As Medicare pays more and more of the nation's total health bill, its decisions on what products and services it will reimburse for are more significant for vendors and for…
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Increased disease prevalence has been hypothesized to be behind much of the growth in health spending. New research published in Health Affairs finds that prevalence growth accounts for little of…
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Maryland is unique among the states in having an all-payer hospital rate regulation system. The most recent report on the system's performance shows that it is continuing to constrain the…
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Another wonderful collection of health care research summaries, including a GAO report on likely effects of the MLR rule, physician work intensity, reducing hospital-acquired infections, discharge followup and hospital readmissions,…
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A Kaiser Family Foundation report surveys state managed care Medicaid programs, finding a surge in utilization of health plans and addition of eligibility categories to the plans. A great variety…
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A paper prepared by Mathematica for the New York State Health Foundation discussions readmissions in the state and evaluates proposed methods of reducing those readmissions. Just in New York, billions…
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Hospitals and other providers have expressed concern that health plan consolidation jeopardizes the adequacy of reimbursement to providers but a new piece of research indicates that hospital consolidation is a…
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New research provides stronger evidence that using electronic health records may improve quality of care according to some measures more than continuing to use paper medical records, at least for…
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The leaves begin to fall but not the quality of our Potpourri, this week including useful data on hospital readmissions in the VA system, what makes top hospitals successful, the…
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About this Blog
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.