More than 700,000 federal workers will be looking for ways to put food on the table as much of the federal government shut down Tuesday over budget squabbles in Congress.
But if you're a federal rat, it's still fat city. Federal mice, too.
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McDermott
Responding to criticism that Medicare is not paying for enough seniors' skilled-nursing care following serious hospitalizations, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) has introduced a bill that would eliminate a barrier to rehab care known as the “three-day rule.”
As it stands, the three-day rule says Medicare will not pay for the time that seniors spend in a nursing home recovering from a hospital stay unless they were hospitalized as an inpatient for three days. McDermott's bill, the “Fairness for Beneficiaries Act,” would eliminate the three-day requirement and replace it with a provision that says seniors would need a physician to certify their need for skilled-nursing, regardless of time spent as an inpatient.
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A rule that would require medical devices to be marked with unique identifiers is still stuck in the regulatory process, and the delay is drawing complaints from lawmakers and health systems.
Four House lawmakers sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, which has yet to release the final rule for the unique device identification system, urging OMB to provide a status update. It has been six years since Congress mandated the development of a device identification system.
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A small group of healthcare providers took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to press their case that the business practices of group purchasing organizations are causing drug shortages.
The group, which is called Physicians Against Drug Shortages, is made up of about seven physicians, a pharmacist and a long-time critic of the GPO industry who say their aim is to restore the supply of generic drugs that have had shortages.
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Oncology nurse Theresa Brown, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times Sunday, argued for government-mandated nurse-staffing ratios.
She cited research showing that each extra patient a nurse had above an established nurse-patient ratio made it 7% more likely that one of the patients would die, and that 20,000 people died a year because they were in hospitals with overworked nurses.
“When hospitals have insufficient nursing staffs, patients who would have gotten better can get hurt, or worse,” Brown wrote.
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Boehner
The New York Times ran a quietly subversive news story Wednesday about how members of Congress and their aides will receive health coverage under the Office of Personnel Management's new proposed rule interpreting a controversial Obamacare provision.
During the drafting of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), an opponent of the legislation, insisted that members of Congress and their staffers should have to buy their coverage from the state health insurance exchanges the same way millions of other Americans would get it—rather than getting it through the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program as they do now. It was a commendable idea that few members of Congress probably thought through.
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It's Christmas in July for Medicare-participating physicians—though the gift is far from being delivered. On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously passed bipartisan legislation to repeal Medicare's sustainable growth-rate formula and replace it with a stable system of payments to the nation's physicians.
For years, Congress has waited until the end of the calendar year to stave off a steep Medicare payment cut to physicians with a temporary fix.
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A bipartisan House bill has been introduced that would require disclosure of Medicare payment information on individual physicians and other healthcare providers and suppliers, to enable the public to compare providers of services.
A companion bill has been pending in the Senate since June, and one Senate spokesperson says the final proposal may be added to the upcoming “doc fix” legislation to come later this year that would change how Medicare doctors are paid under the sustainable growth-rate formula.
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Republican and Democratic leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released the latest version of a draft bill to repeal Medicare's sustainable growth-rate formula calling for a five-year period of stable payment increases as physicians transition into new payment models. But lawmakers still offered no way to offset the cost of the repeal.
Totaling 70 pages, the bill is a work in progress, as the panel's health subcommittee will mark up the legislation next week. Committee members—along with members of the House Ways and Means Committee—have worked throughout the year to craft a bill incorporating comments from more than 80 stakeholders. As before, this version of the bill gives providers the option of leaving traditional Medicare fee-for-service to try new payment models that emphasize better quality and lower costs.
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Technology industry association leaders who testified Thursday before a House subcommittee hearing on whether legislation is needed for data breach reporting called for Congress to pre-empt state laws on data breaches. But at least one witness opposed such preemption.
“There is a growing and exceptionally strong case to be made for the creation of a national data breach notification framework that supersedes state data breach laws,” said Dan Liutikas, chief legal officer of Washington- based Computing Technology Industry Association, a trade group for the computer hardware manufacturers, software developers and other information technology specialists.
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Technology industry association leaders who testified Thursday before a House subcommittee hearing on whether legislation is needed for data breach reporting called for Congress to pre-empt state laws on data breaches. But at least one witness opposed such preemption.
“There is a growing and exceptionally strong case to be made for the creation of a national data breach notification framework that supersedes state data breach laws,” said Dan Liutikas, chief legal officer of Washington- based Computing Technology Industry Association, a trade group for the computer hardware manufacturers, software developers and other information technology specialists.
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