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Healthwatch with Dr. Leana Wen: Saving ACA, New Opioid Data, Women's Health at Risk
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WYPR, By Tom Hall and Rob Sivak, August 8, 2018
Today we begin the hour with another edition of the Midday Healthwatch. Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen is here to discuss some of the troubling new data on Maryland's opioid problem, and some new efforts by Congressman Elijah Cummings and Senator Elizabeth Warren to help address it. She'll explain why the city has joined a lawsuit to stop the Trump Administration's continuing efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act, and why Baltimore is fighting a White House plan to restrict Title X funding for women's health programs. Dr. Wen also describes the importance of last week's Breastfeeding Awareness Week...and she takes your questions and comments about public health! ...
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PRMC Holds Groundbreaking Ceremony for New Endoscopy Center in Ocean Pines
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WMDT, By Taylor Lumpkin, August 8, 2018
In Ocean Pines officials from Peninsula Regional Medical held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new endoscopy center at the Delmarva Health Pavilion. The 12,000 sq ft. building will be one of of two new buildings coming to the area in hopes of making health care convenient for residents. Health officials say the new center will include a surgery center, an urgent care, and offices for specialty physicians to provide the best care for patients. "More and more of healthcare is about how do we keep people healthy and well and out of the hospital and much of that comes down to a good relation with a primary care doctor which we have as well as services close to home so It's convenient as folks are more likely to engage with their providers and that's what we're really trying to build here is a campus without hospital beds so that folks will engage in the process," said PRMC CEO Steven Leonard. ...
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Trump Administration Clears Way for Obamacare Insurer Program
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Washington Examiner, By Kimberly Leonard, August 8, 2018
The Trump administration is asking for input on an Obamacare program that collects and pays out billions of dollars to health insurance companies. The administration had already announced it planned this year to authorize the program for 2017, after initially saying it was putting payments on hold. The Wednesday announcement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services asks for comment about how to move forward in 2018 for the payments that will go out in 2019. The roughly $10 billion in payments, known as "risk adjustment," are intended to reduce incentives for health insurers to try to bring in only healthy customers and avoid customers with pre-existing medical conditions that need ongoing treatment, such as cancer or diabetes. ...
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ACA Subsidies Cost More per Person than Medicaid. Is That Sustainable?
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Modern Healthcare, By Susannah Luthi, August 8, 2018
Government spending on Obamacare premiums has raced past its per-person spending on Medicaid expansion, and the gap is poised to increase-a trend that has some policy experts shaking their heads over the long-term economic picture and at least one major insurer questioning the sustainability of the individual market. This year, federal dollars going to exchange premium subsidies more than doubled from 2014 and the Congressional Budget Office projected they will nearly double again over the next decade. States are pursuing reinsurance waivers and even eying further expanding Medicaid-where the federal government shoulders nearly all the cost-through a public option to lower expenses for the people covered through the exchanges. But congressional gridlock over the Affordable Care Act's future will likely drive the cost trend forward. ...
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Value-based Purchasing Programs Tougher for Academic Hospitals
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Modern Healthcare, By Maria Castellucci, August 8, 2018
Academic medical centers are penalized more under the CMS' various value-based purchasing programs than community hospitals, according to a new report. The study, published Wednesday by the consultancy Navigant, found 24% of academic medical centers received penalties for their performance on three of the CMS' value-based payment programs in fiscal 2018, while 13.7% of community hospitals received the same number of penalties. Additionally, 9.4% of community hospitals didn't receive a penalty on any of the CMS programs, while just 1.7% of academic medical centers weren't penalized. The three programs referred to are the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program and the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program. ...
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Uncompensated-care Audits Coming in Fall
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Modern Healthcare, By Tara Bannow, August 4, 2018
Now that hospitals' uncompensated-care claims affect how much the federal government pays them, the industry is bracing for heightened scrutiny of its reporting. This is the first fiscal year of a three-year phase-in during which the CMS will use hospitals' charity care and bad debt, together known as uncompensated care, to calculate their disproportionate-share hospital payments. Those payments used to be based mostly on how many Medicaid, dual-eligible and disabled patients hospitals served, but the Affordable Care Act included the switch under the assumption that more people would gain coverage under Medicaid and subsidized plans. "It was really looked at as a threat before, for lack of a better term, but now it's being implemented," said Brian Green, a director with accounting firm RSM and co-leader of its regulatory practice, on the impending
audits. ...
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Inducing Labor at 39 Weeks for Healthy Pregnancies May Improve Outcomes for Mothers, Study Suggests
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The Washington Post, By Ariana Eunjung Cha, August 8, 2018
The prevailing wisdom on healthy pregnancies has long been to just wait it out. Only after reaching the full-term 40-week mark will many doctors consider hurrying a birth along with drugs. The thinking is that inducing labor increases the risk of complications, which lead to more Caesarean sections, putting both the baby and the mother at risk. A new study suggests that idea might be wrong. The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, focuses on healthy, first-time mothers. More than 6,000 women in 41 hospitals were enrolled in the study and were randomized into two groups. About half were induced in the 39th week of pregnancy. The others were allowed to let their pregnancies progress beyond that time. The study's outcome was a surprise: Women induced at 39 weeks were less likely to need a C-section than those who waited to let labor begin spontaneously - 18.6 percent for the induced group, compared with 22.2 percent for the other group. ...
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Lax Oversight Leaves Surgery Center Regulators and Patients in the Dark
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USA Today, By Christina Jewett and Mark Alesia, August 9, 2018
The first man died in April 2014. Another died later that month. Then, on July 18 of that year, a woman was rushed to a hospital where she was told she was lucky to be alive. They all went to the same Little Rock, Arkansas, surgery center for a colonoscopy, among the safest procedures a patient can have. And each stopped breathing soon afterward, court records say, sustaining the same type of brain damage seen in a drowning victim. What happened at Kanis Endoscopy Center prompted no review by officials in Arkansas, which, like 16 other states, has no mandate to report patient deaths after surgery center care. So no facility oversight authority has examined whether the deaths were a statistical anomaly or cause for alarm. ...
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OPINION: The Trump Administration's Absurd Devaluing of Cancer Care for Seniors
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The Hill, By Jeffrey Vacirca, August 8, 2018
Let me take you into my exam room when I had to give my 75-year-old patient, "Mrs. Simpson" (a real patient's case but using a pseudonym for privacy), the terrible news that she has multiple myeloma. Her case underscores the absurdity of the Trump administration's recent proposal to pay the same amount to providers to evaluate and manage a patient with the sniffles, as they would to manage Mrs. Simpson's complicated cancer. Triggered by a low white blood cell count, I had found an abnormal protein in Mrs. Simpson's blood and then performed a bone marrow biopsy. Nothing in the recently proposed Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) 2019 Physician Fee Schedule would impact her care, so far. But, going forward, we would enter the post-diagnosis evaluation and management (E&M) phase of her care, and the irrationality of the CMS proposal was quickly apparent. ...
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About this Publication
MHA's News Roundup is compiled by MHA as a member service for all hospital/health system executives. Some of the publications require a log-on or subscription.
Please note: The information included in this publication reflects news coverage carried recently, about hospitals and health care, by local and national newspapers, and does not reflect the opinions of the Maryland Hospital Association.
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