What not-for-profit hospitals pay their CEOs has little to do with financial performance or quality scores, but the top executives generally make more at hospitals with expensive technology and high marks in patient satisfaction, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The researchers drew data on 1,877 CEOs overseeing 2,691 hospitals from the Form 990 their organization submitted to the IRS for the 2009 tax year.
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Demand for primary-care doctors remains strong, while the incentive packages they are being offered are changing, according to a survey by Merritt Hawkins, an Irving, Texas-based physician search firm.
Merritt Hawkins had 3,097 recruiting assignments between April 1, 2012, and March 31, 2013, according to its 20th annual review of physician and advanced practitioners recruiting incentives. And, for the seventh-straight year, the most sought-after
physicians were family doctors and internists with 624 and 194 searches respectively
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Though the gender earnings gap has been narrowing across most professions, sharp salary inequities persist among physicians, according to a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Researchers analyzed data—occupation, hours worked, annual earnings, age, sex and race—from the March Current Population Survey to identify trends in male and female pay among physicians, other healthcare professionals and workers overall.
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A large North Carolina hospital and a suburban Chicago system are the latest to trim their payrolls and point to revenue pressure from the federal healthcare reform law as a primary cause.
At Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., the belt-tightening hits the C-suite, including the CEO's salary.
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Doctors asked to assess options for reducing healthcare costs were not exactly enthusiastic about replacing the system that pays them based on the volume of tests, exams and procedures they perform.
Granted, cuts to Medicare physician pay proved even less popular among the nearly 3,000 doctors surveyed on their opinions for strategies to blunt the nation's high and rising healthcare costs. Just 1% of the polled physicians described their attitude toward this option as “very enthusiastic.”
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The American Medical Association has responded sharply to a July 20 Washington Post investigative article that found that the AMA/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC) has overvalued many procedures by overstating the amount of physicians' time required to perform them. Washington Monthly published a critical article about the RUC earlier this month, similarly charging that the RUC is essentially a secret cabal of specialty physicians that overvalues services and fixes prices.
The Post reporters counted the number of Medicare procedures that gastroenterologists, ophthalmologists, orthopedists and other specialists performed at surgery centers in Florida and Pennsylvania. They found that if the physicians had taken the amount of time estimated by the RUC to do each procedure, they would have had to work an average of more than 12 hours a day, when the surgery centers typically were open only 10 hours.
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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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