Specialty Focus 9/24/26: Medicare's sudden drug cost surge + Why witnessing death outside the hospital felt different

September 24, 2026 | Volume XV | Issue 38

Witnessing death in Maui

Denise Moulton, RN writes for KevinMD:

I’ve been a registered nurse for over eighteen years. I’ve held dying newborns, guided families through their loved one’s final days, and summoned hospital chaplains to honor last wishes and sit with families in their worst moments. In the controlled chaos of a hospital, health care workers know their roles, and there’s a crash cart three steps away. Death, in a clinical sense, is something that I know.

Or so I thought, until I watched a man die on vacation in Maui.

Medicare's sudden drug cost surge

Chris Pope writes for City Journal:

For its first 15 years, Medicare’s prescription drug benefit was a fiscal success story: it had cost much less than expected, and its expense was rising slower than inflation. But from 2021 to 2025, the program’s price tag suddenly jumped, from $105 billion to $182 billion. For 2026, it is projected to leap again, to $222 billion.

The main driver of this development is not expensive new drugs but an enormous miscalculation of the cost of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which the Biden administration boasted would save taxpayers billions.

Congress established a prescription drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries in 2003, almost 40 years after instituting coverage for hospitalizations and physician services. Medicare Part D makes Prescription Drug Plans (PDPs) responsible for purchasing drugs from manufacturers—in return for monthly payments funded 92 percent by public subsidies and 8 percent from beneficiary premiums.

ABA Billable Units and the Eight-Minute Rule

Peter Suarez, Esq.

ABA billable units are not a rounding convention your billing team gets to choose. Florida Medicaid sets the arithmetic in writing, and the rule is that leftover minutes count only when they reach eight. If your agency bills behavior analysis in fifteen-minute increments, you need to know that a documented 52-minute session is three units and not four — because the difference between those two numbers, repeated across a caseload for a year, is the cleanest overpayment finding an auditor can make.

Florida confirms dengue fever death amid one of its worst outbreaks in decades

WESH 2 News

Florida is experiencing one of its worst surges of dengue fever in decades, and the toll now includes a death. The Florida Department of Health confirmed the death Friday, though it didn’t provide further details. It’s one of more than 130 locally acquired dengue cases reported so far this year in Hillsborough County, which typically sees only a handful.

View video HERE.

Last Word

Publisher of Week in Review, Specialty Focus, FHIweekly & Game Changers