Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
Docs Still Less Likely to Treat Medicaid Patients
Medicaid patients continue to be last in line when it comes to finding doctors willing to serve them. At least that’s the conclusion drawn in a new analysis prepared by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission. According to a presentation delivered at a MACPAC meeting last week: Doctors are less likely to accept new Medicaid patients (70.8 percent) than they are patients insured by Medicare (85.3 percent) or private insurers (90 percent), with a much greater differential in acceptance rates among specialists and psychiatrists. Pediatricians, general surgeons, and [...]
Hospitals Flee Downside Risk in Medicare Bundled Programs
More than half of the hospitals that voluntary participate in Medicare bundled payment model programs leave those programs when faced with the possibility of financial penalties based on their performance. So concludes a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Some of these models feature both “upside” and “downside” risk. Upside risk offers financial incentives to participants that keep their costs below targeted amounts; they share those savings with Medicare. Downside risk occurs when hospitals are penalized when their costs exceed agreed-upon targets. Some of the model programs begin [...]
No Medicaid Expansion=Greater Peril for Rural Hospitals
Rural hospitals located in states that did not expand their Medicaid programs, as authorized by the Affordable Care Act, are at much greater risk of closing than hospitals in states that did expand their Medicaid programs. According to a Stateline report, most of the 100 rural hospitals that have closed since 2010 and most of the more than 600 rural hospitals that are considered to be in danger of closing now are located in states like Texas, Mississippi, and 12 others that have not expanded their Medicaid programs. Small rural [...]
MedPAC: Overhaul Medicare Quality Programs
Medicare would implement major changes in its hospital quality programs under a proposal approved by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Fierce Healthcare reports that the proposal adopted by MedPAC for recommendation to Congress and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services …would essentially lump together several existing programs that measure quality—the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program and the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program—into the Hospital Value Incentive Program (HVIP). It would also eliminate the existing Inpatient Quality Reporting Program. Under the MedPAC proposal, Performance across five domains—readmissions, mortality, spending, patient [...]
MedPAC Meets
Last week the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission met in Washington, D.C. to discuss a number of Medicare payment issues. The issues on MedPAC’s December agenda were: The Medicare prescription drug program (Part D) Opioids and alternatives in hospital settings: payments, incentives, and Medicare data Hospital inpatient and outpatient services payments Redesigning Medicare’s hospital quality incentive programs Physicians and other health professional services payments Medicare payment policies for advanced practice registered nurses and physician assistants Ambulatory surgical centers and hospice payments Skilled nursing facilities, home health agency, and inpatient rehabilitation facilities [...]