reimbursements

In Indiana, doctors and hospitals are protesting a plan to transfer the state's Medicaid patients to three private insurers. Providers are vehemently resisting the change because the insurers have proposed a 30 percent cut to physician reimbursement for Medicare patients. Doctors and hospitals say that the steep cuts will force physicians to limit the number of Medicaid patients they treat, leaving a high number of indigent patients to receive expensive emergency care. Insurance company …

In a Q&A with UPI, William Plested III, president of the AMA, discusses the impact of Medicare reimbursement rate cuts on physicians. He says that their primary concern is that physicians--particularly geriatricians--won't be able to afford taking on more elderly patients if Medicare doesn't reimburse them properly. According to an AMA study, 45 percent of physicians say the cuts will …

Issues as diverse as Hurricane Katrina, Chinese use of steel and high oil and copper prices are impacting the cost of hospital construction in the midst of an industry-wide building boom. For about 20 years, hospital building costs rose only two to three percent a year. Since 2004, however, the cost of building a hospital has risen as much as ten percent a year, averaging "between $265 and $275 per square foot…up from less than $100 in 1995," according to the Birmingham Business …

California Medical Association (CMA), the state's largest physician group, has released a report ranking the state's insurers by the percentage of their budget spent on healthcare in 2005. The ranking is part of the group's campaign to get insurance companies to spend more money on medical costs--including doctor's reimbursements--and less on profits and overhead. Blue Cross of California (California's largest insurer) ranked the lowest. The insurer spent 78.9 percent of their revenue on …

CMS will phase its new Medicare cost-weighting system in over three years, rather than trying to do it all in 2007 as previously planned. The final regulations, released yesterday, also won't slash payments as deeply as feared when CMS released its initial proposal in April. Only 2 percent of hospitals will have their payments drop, and those drops aren't related to the new rules, says today's story in The Wall Street Journal. Overall CMS payments to hospitals will increase 3.5 …

A federal judge in Florida threw out a major case against UnitedHealth, resolving a class action suit the that has faced the health plan for the last eight years. About 800,000 physicians had filed suit against the insurer, arguing that it unfairly cut reimbursements. Claims against Coventry Health, which was also named in the suit, were thrown out as well. In March, Arizona fined UnitedHealth for improperly denying thousands of physician claims. Last week, the company was forced to …

A plan to move thousands of Florida Medicaid patients to managed care goes to Washington for approval this week. Florida officials said disagreements between the state and CMS over hospital reimbursements may cause a delay in the implementation of the scheme. On Wednesday, Florida released details of its ambitious pilot project which will move patients from its state-run program to a market-based alternative. The experiment will see Medicaid enrollees in Broward and Duval counties moved …