Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
High-Deductible Plans Losing Luster Amid Low Unemployment
The competition for employees is leading more businesses to offer more generous health insurance plans in addition to high-deductible plans. As health insurance premiums rose in recent years, more and more companies were offering their employees more high-deductible insurance options to help keep down the cost of premiums. Now, however, with some workers clamoring for more conventional plans and businesses finding themselves in competition for workers at a time of low unemployment, more businesses are offering those conventional plans to their workers. 2020, in fact, will mark the third consecutive [...]
Azar: More Value-Based Care Coming
Medicare may add more value-based care initiatives and alternative payment models to those it already operates, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar suggested at a recent event in Washington, D.C. During his remarks, Azar spoke about population health benefits, global budgeting for Medicare patients, more primary care programs, and new models that address kidney care and opioid use and hinted at future efforts that address social determinants of health. Learn more about Azar’s remarks about Medicare value-based purchasing and alternative payment models and other current federal health policy matters [...]
Verma Hints at More Medicaid Changes, Deregulation
Stay tuned for more Medicaid changes, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Seema Verma told a Las Vegas health care gathering last week. CMS, she told her audience, will …soon outline new opportunities for states to flip the Medicaid paradigm and free themselves from federal micromanagement. While Verma offered few details, one idea clearly emerged: there will be more deregulation. She insisted, for example, that Medicaid work requirements are not dead. While such requirements have run into trouble in the courts in recent months, she explained that CMS is [...]
More Hospitals Gain Than Lose in FY 2020 Value-Based Purchasing Program
Medicare’s value-based purchasing program will reward more hospitals than it will penalize in FY 2020 through its value-based purchasing program. The program, in which 2700 hospitals are scored in four domains – clinical outcomes, safety, person and community engagement, and efficiency and cost reduction – will distribute $1.9 billion in bonus payments to 1500 hospitals. Bonus payment average 0.6 percent, with a high of 2.93 percent. Penalties average -0.39 percent, with a high of -1.72 percent. Overall, rural hospitals performed better in the safety, person and community engagement, and efficiency [...]
Tools for Controlling Cost Growth Limited
Employers and insurers sometimes have limited means of reducing growth in health care costs, a new study has found. While hospitals can take incremental steps to manage rising costs, those efforts will be outstripped in geographic markets that have undergone a great deal of consolidation, according to a new analysis from the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. In areas of such consolidation, the study found, insurers can be reluctant to negotiate hard with hospitals and health systems or to threaten to exclude those providers from their networks and businesses, rather [...]