According to Romley, Jena and Goldman (2011), the answer is yes. For each of 6 diagnoses at admission—acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, acute stroke, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, hip fracture, and pneumonia—patient admission to higher-spending hospitals was associated with lower risk-adjusted inpatient mortality. During 1999 to 2003, for example, patients admitted with acute myocardial infarction to [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Hospitals' Category
Do hospitals cost shift?
Many health policy experts claim that hospitals engage in cost shifting. Cost shifting assumes that hospitals have some target profitability level and can demand is fairly inelastic. Thus, if public programs (i.e., Medicare or Medicaid) cut prices, hospitals ‘cost shift’ by raising prices to the privately insured in order to reach their target profitability level. [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The Doc Fix and the Fiscal Cliff
President Barack Obama has signed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which continues current Medicare payment rates for the nation’s physicians through Dec. 31, 2013. This bill nullifies the Sustainable Growth Rate which, if implemented, would have reduced Medicare payments to physicians by 26.5 percent. The doc fix will cost $10.6 billion in fiscal [...]
Read the rest of this entry »How Medicare Measures Hospital Quality
There are many ways that Medicare evaluates hospital quality. Medicare conducts patient surveys (i.e,. HCAHPS). Medicare has hospitals report a variety of process of care measures through the Inpatient Quality Report (IQR) Program. Medicare uses data that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collects via the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) tool to measure [...]
Read the rest of this entry »P4P for Maryland Hospitals
Maryland is a unique state for Hospitals. Since 1977, Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review Commission sets payment rates for all hospitals regardless of the payer. This approach is only feasible because Maryland receives a federal waiver that exempts its hospitals from national Medicare and state Medicaid fee schedules. Just as Medicare has begun implementing its [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Will Medicare Reduce Your Hospial’s Reimbursement Rates?
Do you work at New York-Presbyterian in Manhattan? Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston? Both these hospitals, with large market shares in their cities, will see their Medicare payments reduced through the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) program. If you work at Cleveland Clinic or Intermountain Medical Center in Utah, on the other hand, Medicare will be [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Appropriate IME and DSH payments
Although Medicare has a set rate schedule, not all hospitals receive the same payment for providing the same service. Among the number of adjustments Medicare makes to its inpatient prospective payments rates are the indirect medical education (IME) and disproportionate share hospital (DSH). The goal of IME is to compensate hospitals for patient care costs [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Medicare Payments Cut for Low-Quality Hospitals
In the past, Medicare basically paid hospitals the same amount for every type of admission regardless of quality. Of course, Medicare did adjust payments to hospitals based on the their cost of labor (hospital wage index adjustment), share of low-income patients (disproportionate share hospital payment), and number of medical school residents (indirect medical education payment), [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Can closing a hospital improve the quality of care?
The closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village in New York City at first glance would reduce access to care for New York residents living in the area. To fill the void, however, a number of non-traditional providers have entered to fill the space. For instance, the number of stand-alone urgent care centers are [...]
Read the rest of this entry »For-profits dominate the Hospital landscape in France?
“European healthcare systems…are always presented [in the media] as public sector nirvanas. The Guardian in the UK, for instance, can write po-faced articles praising the French system without acknowledging, for a single moment, that private-for-profit hospitals make up a larger percentage of sales in France than they do in the USA. Or that home care [...]
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