Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
MedPAC Meets
The members of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission held their latest public meeting last week. The issues addressed during the meeting were: Current legal updates to Medicare’s payment rates for clinician services. Staffing ratios and turnover rates in nursing facilities. An alternative method to establish Medicare payments for selected conditions treated in inpatient rehabilitation facilities. A staff work plan for examining prices of generic drugs under Part D For an overview of each of these issues and links to the presentations made by MedPAC’s staff during the discussions, go here.
Survey Looks at Work of Hospital Equity Officers
With more and more hospitals hiring equity officers to lead their efforts to address social determinants of health and the health care disparities that often result, a new survey examines the obstacles those health equity officials are encountering in their work. The survey and follow-up interviews of some of the respondents explore the degree of support the health equity officers believe they have from different officials throughout their hospitals and health systems, the obstacles they have encountered, the differences expressed by respondents based on the type of hospital in which [...]
Lack of Instructors Impedes Fixing Nurse Shortage
The current shortage of nurses across the U.S. can be traced in part to the lack of training opportunities for aspiring nurses and not to a lack of people seeking to pursue nursing as a career. Last year U.S. nursing programs rejected nearly 80,000 qualified applicants because they did not have the capacity train them. Driving this problem are three major challenges. First is the lack of nursing school faculty: nearly 2000 full-time faculty positions remain unfilled, and many part-time positions as well, a problem caused by low salaries; working [...]
DEA Okays Continued Remote Prescribing of Controlled Substances
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has extended the authority of qualified health care providers to prescribe controlled substances via telehealth through the end of 2024. This authorization originated as a temporary measure in response to the COVID-19 public health emergency and this is its second extension since the end of the formal public health emergency. The DEA says it intends to promulgate new remote prescribing standards by the fall of 2024. Without the extension, the authority would have expired on November 11. Learn more about this DEA decision, why it [...]
Medicaid Unwinding Runs Into More Problems
When the COVID-19-era policy of continuous Medicaid eligibility came to an end and the process known as Medicaid unwinding began, policymakers expected significant numbers of people who lost their Medicaid eligibility to find new, affordable coverage in Affordable Care Act health insurance exchange plans. But while bureaucratic snafus that have resulted in millions of people losing their Medicaid eligibility because of paperwork problems rather than income that exceeded Medicaid eligibility criteria have received the most post-pandemic attention, other challenges have arisen that are preventing people from finding new, affordable insurance [...]