When the average person thinks of donating blood, the first words that come to mind are “Red Cross”. However, the American Red Cross only supplies about 40% of transfused blood in the United States. What most people don’t realize is that the U.S. uses a free-market approach to maintain its blood supply with the result […]
What The 2019 Fellowship Match Tells Us About The Future Of American Medicine
Last week, the National Resident Match Program released its annual data report on the most recent fellowship match for positions to begin in July 2019. The fellowship matches take place between May 2018 and January 2019, with different match days for different specialties. The NRMP releases a summary of all of the specialty match results […]
The 2019 Medicare Readmission Penalty
In September, CMS released the financial penalties that hospitals will pay for excessively high percentages of readmissions within 30 days of discharge. This is an annual event when hospitals get to find out how much their reimbursement from Medicare will be cut the next year. CMS focuses on 6 diagnoses when calculating the readmission penalty: […]
Pre-Existing Conditions And Individual Mandates
The Affordable Care Act is the piece of legislation that Americans simultaneously both love and hate. Americans love not being excluded from health insurance if they have pre-existing conditions but hate being forced to buy health insurance if they don’t want to. And so, there has been an effort to eliminate the individual mandate to […]
The Final 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule: Some Winners, No Losers
Last week, CMS released the final rule for the 2019 Medicare Physician fee schedule. The initial proposed fee schedule was released last summer and would have radically changed the way that physicians are paid for outpatient clinical practice. There was a lot of criticism of the proposed fee schedule with most professional medical societies opposing […]
What Medicaid Expansion Tells Us About America’s Health
Medicaid expansion has been a rallying cry for both the politically far left and the politically far right. This post will examine some of the healthcare differences between those states that participated in Medicaid expansion and those states that did not expand Medicare. At its most simplistic, Medicaid expansion has increased federal and state government costs […]
Gaming Hospital Metrics
Hospital and physician performance is measured by a lot of different quality metrics and everyone wants to look good. Sometimes, there are ways to make yourself look good without actually being good – by gaming the metrics. Nobody actually talks about these gaming strategies but a lot of people think about them. I’m not recommending […]
The 2017 Medicare Hospital Star Ratings: Better But Still Not Perfect
Two years ago, I wrote a (rather scathing) post about the 2016 Medicare star rating system for hospitals. Last January, I posted an update about the 2017 star ratings. The 2017 star ratings were supposed to be published last summer but Medicare delayed the release in order to revise the methodology and address some of the criticisms […]
The High Cost Of Observation Status
Medicare and commercial insurance companies love observation status. When a patient has to be hospitalized but only for “less than 2 midnights hospital stay”, then that patient is classified as being in observation status rather than admitted to the hospital. This classification means that the patient is technically an outpatient and not an inpatient and […]
Age Of Physicians By Specialty
At this month’s American Thoracic Society meeting, it was reported that 1/3 of practicing pediatric pulmonologists in the United States are over age 60, a scary number since that indicates we are soon facing shortages of pediatric pulmonologists. It turns out that it is not the only specialty with disproportionately older physicians and these statistics […]