Finance Featured Commentary news and information

It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the...
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Paul Barr, reporter for Modern Healthcare, discusses the Medicare woes unique to rural providers with Tim Wolters, director of reimbursement for Citizens Memorial Healthcare, Bolivar, Mo., at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's 2012 Annual National Institute.
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Maryland is the only state in the nation to enjoy a federal exemption that allows it to regulate how much hospitals can charge patients, much like the state public service commission regulates utility rates.
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Massachusetts' struggle to contain healthcare costs—now focused on the Legislature’s attempts to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the healthcare cost-containment legislation—is about managing the "common pool resource" that fuels healthcare: our wages.
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When it comes to basic R&D, trying to get complex science-based projects off the ground, what's the most effective and efficient approach—through the private sector or the public sector?
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The Accretive Health saga took another turn last week as the billing and collection company said it would launch and fund a panel to set patient collection standards.
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A new controversy may trigger familiar memories for some readers. This one centers on the activities of Accretive Health, a Chicago-based healthcare billing and collection company.
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As the Federal Reserve reminded us last week, the nation's “fiscal cliff” is steadily looming larger on the horizon.
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Rising healthcare costs are busting the federal budget as well as those of states, counties and municipalities. Policy makers and healthcare leaders have spent decades trying to figure out what to do about this. Yet their solutions are failing because of a fundamental and largely unrecognized...
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In an environment as complex as today's healthcare system, simple-seeming solutions are often merely simplistic. Nothing better illustrates that maxim than calls for “pricing transparency” in the medical technology market. But a closer examination of that market ought to lead instead to...
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