federal government

Former HHS secretary Tommy Thompson released a white paper last week addressing chronic problems with Medicaid. He proposed that the federal government take responsibility for long-term care for the elderly and leave care of those under 65 to the states. Now critics are saying that Thompson's proposed changes would benefit four companies with which he is associated (HMO Centene, Deloitte …

Former Bush HHS secretary Tommy Thompson, now a consultant, plans to release a white paper tomorrow addressing chronic problems with Medicaid. Specifically, he plans to recommend that the federal government take over long-term care for the elderly--a service that leads many otherwise law-abiding citizens to try to game Medicaid by monkeying with their assets to appear poor--and leave the states to handle acute care for the under-65 group, especially children. He'll also advocate making …

How do your surgeons get trained to work with new medical implants? Once they're out of residency, they may depend on professional societies or vendor training programs that aren't consistently regulated for quality and effectiveness. And vendor-sponsored programs may create a conflict of interest by tying free training to purchase of their implants. The federal government has started collecting data on cardiac implants, comparing implant specialists with general cardiac surgeons who …

The federal government has OK'ed Massachusetts's proposed universal health insurance plan by granting a Medicaid waiver for the program and agreeing to continue providing $385 million per year in Medicaid funding for the next two years. The agreement also includes an additional $225 million to expand Medicaid coverage, says this article in The Boston Globe. The program will offer a combination of subsidized and low-cost insurance plans, expanded Medicaid coverage and incentives …

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the federal government will announce a $1.75 billion program designed to give some Medicare beneficiaries at-home care rather than treating treatment in nursing homes. Long-term care makes up a third of all Medicaid spending and home-based care often costs less than putting a patient in a nursing home. The CMS funding will cover all expenses incurred in the first year by beneficiaries moving to home care. After that, states will receive …

The HHS Office of Inspector General has found that the federal government overpaid University Hospital, Newark $171.4 million dollars between 1996 and 2001. The state relied on an outside contractor that miscalculated the hospital's disproportionate share payments (DSH)--the amount hospitals are compensated for the higher costs of treating a large number of low-income patients. In 1996, the state hired Deloitte to identify unclaimed expenses and the firm incorrectly included $169.3 …

Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that as many as one in five organ transplant programs don't meet federal certification standards. On Tuesday, CMS head Mark McClellan defended the program in a letter to Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), who had demanded an explanation of the Times article's finding. McClellan stated that the federal government increased oversight last fall in response to problems with the University of California Irvine transplant program. …

With 32 percent of residents lacking health insurance, Houston's Harris County has the highest uninsurance rate in the nation. That is costing area hospitals about $2 billion a year in uncompensated care. An editorial in the Houston Chronicle lauds an effort by Harris County Public Healthcare System Council to use a Federal grant to offer $150 a month insurance to the working poor. Yet this will get at maximum to only 10 percent of the uninsured. According to the editorial, …

After lots of speculation, including being a plot line on NBC's The West Wing, the latest most comprehensive study shows that patients who were being prayed for by strangers did not have better outcomes. In fact, the patients who knew that they were being prayed for had slightly higher rates of complications than those that didn't know but were being prayed for anyway. On the other hand, they had a lower rate of serious complications but the variance was put down to chance by …

In a major gain for pay-for-performance, the American Medical Association officially announced that it has agreed to work with the federal government to develop more than 100 quality indicators that will be used to evaluate the level of care provided by practitioners. The deal, which was leaked to the media last week, marks a tactical shift for the AMA. The AMA has long resisted the idea on the grounds that many quality indicators have the potential of misleading consumers and applying …