Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A number of people talk about Medicaid “best price”…but what is it really? StatNews provides a concise overview: The Medicaid best price law, enacted in 1990, requires drug manufacturers to charge the Medicaid program the lowest or “best” price they negotiate with any other buyer and send a rebate check to every state Medicaid department so…
That is what is proposed by Dana Goldman in his article in The Hill. He uses the case of Louisiana’s approach to pay for treatments for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) to make the point. The [Louisiana] Department of Health is working on a new strategy to expand access—one that involves a licensing deal. The state…
Federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) ended in September 2017. This caused a stir as many parent’s relied on CHIP for their children’s health insurance. In January 2018, however, the federal government’s passed a six-year CHIP funding extension and resolved to continue to fund this program. The headlines at the time showed pictures of…
Having health insurance is great. It largely protects people against financial losses that accrue when you become ill. It provides coverage for medical services. And improves patients health. Well, that last one is only true if health insurance allows you to access care. When health insurance provider reimbursement is low as is the case for…
When you buy a typical product, the vendor does its best to make the purchasing process as easy as possible. There is a reason for this, clearly; they want your business. State and federal governments, however, have no such incentive. In fact, oftentimes reducing the number of people using government services saves money. Thus, it…
The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is a federal program that provides matching funds to states in order for them to provide health insurance to children. The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid. Currently, however, the program is in jeopardy. In fact, federal funding for…
A new paper by Sharma et al. (2017) finds that Medicaid patients living in states with lower Medicaid reimbursement have more challenges accessing primary care services. We found that states with higher Medicaid fees had higher probabilities of appointment offers and shorter wait times for Medicaid patients, and lower probabilities of appointment offers and longer…
In general the answer is yes, but often with some difficulty. AJMC recaps the findings from a the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Quick Stats section from July 21, 2017. 88.9% of primary care physicians said they are accepting new patients, based on 2015 data from the National Electronic Health Records Survey. However,…
In short, the reason is that Medicaid reimbursement rates for providers is too low. Saurabh Jha, however, explains the point a bit more artistically in his Health Care Blog piece. Medicaid pays a cardiologist, with years of training, $25-40 for a consultation to manage a complex patient with multiple comorbidities, on polypharmacy, where the cardiologist…
The Senate’s new health care bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, proposes a number of changes to the Affordable Care Act. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a detailed breakdown of the bill and compares it with the Affordable Care Act that President Obama passed and the American Health Care Act that was proposed…