- Paper straws have more forever chemical than plastic straws.
- CMS: ACOs saved Medicare $1.8 billion. That is 2/10ths of 1% of total Medicare spending. Think how much more would have been saved if ACOs were allowed to convert to become Medicare Advantage plans.
- CRFB: the federal government can save $370 billion over ten years by allowing health insurance subsidies for rich people in the (Obamacare) exchanges to expire by 2026.
- As a senator, Joe Biden voted to raise the retirement age and impose a tax on Social Security benefits.
- Should it be health care or healthcare? And why is it CMS rather than CMMS?
Category: Cost of Healthcare
How Much Charity Care Should Nonprofit Hospitals Provide?
I began my career in health care working as an accountant for a nonprofit hospital. One of our senior finance executives did a case study of how much the heath care system saved compared to a for-profit system that had to pay taxes. I don’t recall all the details, but it was in the neighborhood of $100 million dollars in 1990. About that same time the accounting managers were told we could no longer write off bad debts to charity care. Charity care had to be granted to deserving patients; we weren’t allowed to decide after not getting paid that care must have been charity.
Thursday Links
- Amazon is providing prices and wait times for primary care.
- The CDC officials “used inaccurate information and misrepresented medical research” to promote mask wearing.
- CDC report: 1 in 5 women receiving maternity care were mistreated and almost 1 in 3 experienced discrimination because of age, weight, income, etc.
- Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok reflect on their 20-year-old blog.
- Nearly 160 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters out of New York, taking nearly $1 trillion in assets under management with them. (Bloomberg)
How Medicare Advantage Saves Taxpayers Money
Here is one example:
The Medicare Advantage plans know that 90 percent of the amputations are caused by foot ulcers and that you can reduce foot ulcers by over 40 percent with clean socks and dry feet. Medicare Advantage plans have staff working on dry feet and clean socks, [while] the fee-for-service providers who make more than $100,000 for each amputation in their fees actually had an increase in cases during covid because it’s so profitable.
The [MA] special-needs plans had almost no amputations.