Coming out of a recession (and perhaps entering another), here's a timely new paper that suggests hospitals that face financial threats will scale back unprofitable services.
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Modern Healthcare this week looks at fledgling efforts to convert what many believe to be a health policy chimera into day-to-day practice. The magazine reports on results of its first survey of planned—and operational—accountable care organizations.
Results show healthcare executives inventing a fix on the fly for the unrelenting growth in U.S. healthcare spending.
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Results for Medicare's first big test of physician incentive pay were released this month. Performance in the final year looked much as it did the prior four years. Once again, more than half of the medical groups failed to earn incentive bonuses.
The lopsided results underscore a tension about overhauling how the United States pays for healthcare. Policymakers and the industry widely agree that payment should no longer reward hospitals and doctors simply for being busy. Unsurprisingly, that agreement does not extend to details of proposed alternatives. Schisms among insurers, hospitals, doctors and those that ultimately pay for care (Congress, states, employers) have erupted over the potential gains and losses.
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Hospitals benefit more from property tax breaks than any other tax exemption by far, according to research on the value of those tax breaks and how hospitals earn them. No wonder then, after Illinois denied property tax exemptions for three hospitals this week, the state hospital association stridently decried the outcome.
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Federal Judge Stanley Marcus did not agree with the prevailing 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion last week that found Congress' 2010 individual mandate for health insurance coverage unconstitutional. Marcus is one of three appeals judges who considered one of two legal challenges to the mandate moving toward the U.S. Supreme Court, Joe Carlson reports in Modern Healthcare this week.
Under prior Supreme Court decisions, Marcus argued, the power Congress holds through the Commerce Clause has expanded to include broad regulatory undertakings, Carlson wrote.
Congress crafted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate “to regulate quintessentially economic conduct in order to ameliorate two large national problems,” Marcus said in his dissent. Those problems? Uninsured patients need care but cannot pay; those costs get pushed elsewhere. And those with prior medical conditions struggle to gain health insurance coverage.
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Some of the fallout from Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. debt looks eerily familiar.
What many considered a remote risk became reality when the nation lost its sterling credit rating. During and after the credit crisis, hospital finance chiefs closely examined—and some reduced—balance sheet risks that seemed doubtful before the dislocation.
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One of the first blog posts here reported on early evidence that hospitals cut their way through the Great Recession to protect margins.
Data reported since have bolstered initial reports that layoffs, construction and renovation delays and other efforts to clamp down on spending helped hospitals rebound even as the economy continued to struggle.
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As hospitals wait for a final definition of municipal advisers, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board continues to press on with the release of new adviser oversight.
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The House last night and the Senate this afternoon approved a deficit reduction deal that brings to mind the best of Alfred Hitchcock: As the plotline unfolds, the sense of foreboding grows. Those who watch events play out are less puzzled by mystery than gripped with suspense (as Hitchcock said he preferred).
The president and Congress agreed to a plan that leaves $1.5 trillion worth of deficit reductions to a committee on a breathtaking deadline. Congress would be required to vote up or down once the committee drafts a plan, which must be finished the day before Thanksgiving. Lawmakers must enact at least $1.2 trillion in reductions by mid-January or automatic cuts will make up the difference. That would include Medicare cuts of up to 2%.
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