Tag Archives: Healthcare

PTSD is a scourge for military veterans. The good news is that the VA system provides specialized, high-quality care for PTSD; the bad news is that corporate-friendly politicians are privatizing this vital public health system. PTSD Is a Nightmare. A Fully Funded VA Can Provide Relief, jacobin.com, Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early As the introduction say, there is politics involved with the VA. Moving veterans to commercial healthcare is a...

Don Berwick says MA growth “should be slowed or stopped” Obama CMS Chief Don Berwick: Medicare Advantage Plans Game the System, MedPage Today, Cheryl Clark Ok, this is a long one. It is easy to follow. Donald Berwick is worthwhile read. As written several times on Angry Bear, the biggest driver of healthcare cost is “pricing” increases as reflected in hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare insurance. It was Dr. Donald Berwick while...

KFF Health News: In 2010 President Barack Obama signed legislation to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Its purpose he said “the new agency had one priority . . . looking out for people, not big banks, not lenders, not investment houses.” But people . . . Since then, the CFPB has done its share of policing mortgage brokers, student loan companies, and banks. More recently, the U.S. health care system has turned tens of millions of...

A comprehensive All-Payer Claims Databases would help the health care system become more effective and efficient. The Department of Labor could do something about that, but hasn’t. Merrill at GoozNews is depicting why providers and software vendors closely guard patient information, maintaining exclusivity so as patients have to rely on them. Insurance companies follow suit so as to maintain the frequency and particularity of care for disease,...

I am late in getting this information up on Angry Bear. I should have checked fellow Michigander Charles Gaba’s site ACA Signups. Most of the time, Charles is way ahead of me on healthcare just like some of the others are from time to time. This is a rundown of what President Biden is going to tell us tonight. What he intends to offer US Citizens, with Congressional help, and with regard to healthcare. Keep this post as a marker and let’s see...

This post uses material that a Facebook friend posted. I re-post it here with her permission.Any provider that uses a Billing Software (that has Change HealthCare integrated in their system as the main clearinghouse) can’t get claims to insurance companies once they medically bill for something/services in their software. Change Healthcare is the ‘bridge’. The claim goes from the provider, over the bridge, to the insurance company. Then once the claim...

Millions of People Who Could Benefit from Obamacare Don’t Because They Don’t Know About It, and Neither Does the New York Times Center for Economic and Policy Research, Dean Baker. I and others have written about the PPACA multiple times over since it came out and has been improved repeatedly since its introduction. Lets start with the subsidy cliff which was at 400% FPL. President Biden changed the law on it allowing higher incomes to receive...

This is not just Physican practices being bought up. A while back I was writing about hospitals merging with other hospitals and healthcare practices being bought up. The advantage of such is in negotiating rates with insurance companies. ~~~~~~~~ A measurement of the competitiveness of a hospital within a certain area of the country is done utilizing the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). It has been used to measure competition in and around...

The Trump administration and the ACA marketplace: An assessment (Part 1), xpostfactoid, Andrew Sprung. In the wake of Trump’s vow to repeal the ACA if elected, Larry Levitt, EVP of health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, outlines the former president’s past and purported future healthcare agenda. One of Trump’s biggest political failures as president was his inability to persuade Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA)....

Factual story, not quite a year old. and more than likely still, still having relevance. Prior authorizations for care before getting it should not be problematic. Prior authorization should have been far easier. Except some healthcare insurance use delays to discourage patients. Indeed. one would think no more than 24 hours would be needed for authorization. Quick cure to some of the delays would be to publicly publish the amounts of delays and...