- To do want he wants to do, RFK Jr will be head of the wrong agency.
- More than 50% of the AMA’s revenue in 2023, or $266 million, came from a budget category that includes medical billing codes. (Statnews)
- From 1997 to 2011, 85% of the increase in real per-capita Medicare spending was on newly created procedure codes.
- Final House Select Committee report: Covid likely came for the Wuhan lab.
- More than one-third of 100 hospitals reviewed did not properly post machine-readable pricing data, as required by law.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Harris Rosen, RIP
Harris Rosen was the first business owner in the US who did what every other owner would like to do but hasn’t: provide his employees with high quality care at half the cost.
Under the circumstances, you’d expect Rosen’s health care costs to be sky high. Instead, on a per capita basis they’re about 40 percent less than the national average—despite the fact that Rosen Hotel employees are generally older and in poorer health than the general population, have a higher percentage of at-risk pregnancies and include an above-average number of diabetics.More.
Wednesday Links
- A theory of why there are food deserts. (speculative)
- Tyler Cowen’s skepticism about assisted dying in the UK.
- Why Bernie Sanders is wrong: 60% of Americans do not live “paycheck-to-paycheck.”
- Every ethnic group believes that America is “the greatest country on earth,” including 75% of Hispanic and 58% of blacks. The only group that doesn’t believe that are white liberal elites (31%).
- The downside of weight loss drugs: to keep your weight off, you have to stay on the drugs forever.
New Findings on Risk Adjustment
Study: About two-thirds of the 41 percent increase between 2011 and 2019 in the share of hospital discharges coded as the highest severity was associated with upcoding.
Among patients discharged to a skilled nursing facility (SNF) during 2018–19, MA enrollees had risk scores that averaged 4.1 percent higher, with about 60 percent of that increment associated with chart reviews.
About one-quarter of the risk-score gap between MA and traditional Medicare from 2017 to 19 is due to the failure to consistently capture chronic conditions in fee-for-service claims.
Source: Health Affairs