The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled in favor of non-profit hospitals in response to a challenge to their exemption from local property taxes. Upholding a 2016 lower court ruling, the state Supreme Court affirmed that non-profit hospitals’ charitable expenditures can be used to offset their local property tax liabilities. Learn more about the court’s decision in this article in Crain’s Chicago Business.
Non-profit hospitals’ operating margins fell from a median of 2.8 percent in 2016 to 1.9 percent in 2017, according to Fitch Ratings. Non-profit hospitals’ profitability also declined. Despite this, Fitch finds that these hospitals have strong balance sheets, with cash on hand and cash-to-debt ratios rising in the past year. It warns, though, that continuing declines in operating margins could eventually threaten those healthy balance sheets. Learn more about Fitch’s analysis in this summary of its ratings report.
In a newly proposed rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposes easing the regulatory burden on health care providers. The proposed regulation, which weighs in at 285 pages, covers a broad range of government regulation of health care providers and would, CMS projects, save hospitals more than $1 billion a year while cutting millions of hours of administrative work. Learn more about what CMS proposes by reading its fact sheet on the proposed regulation or going here to see the proposed regulation itself.
The first reporting period for Medicare’s Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model found that participating providers cut costs for episodes of care by more than $900, or 3.3 percent. Most of the savings, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reports, were achieved by sending patients to less-expensive post-acute-care settings or by reducing patients’ length of stay in such facilities. CMS also found that the program’s mandatory participants, located in 67 metropolitan statistical areas, achieved these savings without compromising quality of care as measured by post-discharge emergency room visits, hospital readmissions, and deaths. Learn more about CJR’s early results in [...]
People are using hospital emergency departments less frequently for low-acuity medical problems, turning instead to retail clinics and urgent care. According to a new study of a limited patient population published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Visits to the ED for the treatment of low-acuity conditions decreased by 36% (from 89 visits per 1000 members in 2008 to 57 visits per 1000 members in 2015), whereas use of non-ED venues increased by 140% (from 54 visits per 1000 members in 2008 to 131 visits per 1000 members in 2015). There was an increase in visits to all non-ED venues: urgent care [...]
Leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee have written to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Seema Verma to praise her agency’s work in eliminating Medicare red tape – but also asking her to “…take further steps to improve patient care by alleviating administrative and regulatory burdens for Medicare providers.” In three separate letters, committee chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Health Subcommittee chairman Peter Roskam (R-IL) expressed their pleasure with CMS’s recent efforts but specified areas where they would like to see further action. For hospitals, they wrote that they seek further red-tape cutting in the areas of [...]
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has asked the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission to examine the impact of hospital consolidation on patients and federal health care spending. In a letter signed by Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), Health Subcommittee chairman Michael Burgess (R-TX), and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee chairman Gregg Harper (R-MS), the Energy and Commerce Committee states that We request the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) conduct research examining questions regarding the market trend of hospital consolidation and the degree to which such consolidation increases cost to the Medicare program and beneficiaries, including the costs for [...]
Eight percent of American hospitals – 450 of them – are at risk of closing in the coming years and another 10 percent, or 600 hospitals, are considered “weak” according to a new analysis performed by Morgan Stanley. The signs of these problems include sinking margins, declining occupancy and revenue, and government and insurer policies that enable patients to receive certain services at facilities other than hospitals, as they did in the past. The largest concentrations of at-risk hospitals can be found in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. Learn more about the Morgan Stanley analysis in this Bloomberg [...]
Medicare would make more payments for outpatient services on a site-neutral basis under a newly proposed regulation just released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The 2019 Medicare outpatient prospective payment system regulation, published in proposal form, calls for: paying physician fee schedule rates rather than hospital outpatient rates at excepted off-campus provider-based departments; slashing payments for office visits; extending this year’s 340B prescription drug discount payments, already cut nearly 30 percent this year, to additional providers; and raising ambulatory surgical center rates and expanding the list of procedures that can be performed in such facilities so they [...]
Patients served at academic medical centers have a better chance of surviving the health problems that brought them to those facilities. Or so concludes a new study published in the journal Health Affairs. According to the study, We examined more than 11.8 million hospitalizations in the period 2012–14 for Medicare beneficiaries ages sixty-five and older and found that, after adjustment for patient and hospital characteristics, high-severity patients had 7 percent lower odds, medium-severity patients had 13 percent lower odds, and low-severity patients had 17 percent lower odds of thirty-day mortality when treated at an academic medical center for common medical conditions, compared to similar [...]