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On May 7, the Obama administration boasted that ObamaCare was improving health-care quality for seniors, and it pulled out a bag of statistical tricks to prove it. But a closer look shows that it’s not improving care. It’s skimping on it, socking seniors with unexpected bills for “observation care” and likely shortening their lives. President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that fewer seniors discharged from the hospital are returning for additional care within a month’s time. HHS claims that this drop in “readmissions,” from 18.5 percent in 2012 to 17.5 percent in 2013, signals quality improvement. Nationwide,...

On May 7, the Obama administration boasted that ObamaCare was improving health-care quality for seniors, and it pulled out a bag of statistical tricks to prove it. But a closer look shows that it’s not improving care. It’s skimping on it, socking seniors with unexpected bills for “observation care” and likely shortening their lives. President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that fewer seniors discharged from the hospital are returning for additional care within a month’s time. HHS claims that this drop in “readmissions,” from 18.5 percent in 2012 to 17.5 percent in 2013, signals quality improvement. Nonsense....

Every person covered by Medicare would shell out an additional $3 a month if the government agreed to pay to screen certain current and former smokers for lung cancer, a new study estimates. It would cost Medicare $2 billion a year to follow recent advice to offer these lung scans—and fuel angst about rising health costs that are borne by everyone, not just smokers, the study found. […] Lung cancer is the world’s top cancer killer, mainly because it’s usually found too late for treatment to do much good. Most deaths involve Medicare-age people, and most are due to smoking....

The health care law has opened up an unusual opportunity for some mothers-to-be to save on medical bills for childbirth. Lower-income women who signed up for a private policy in the new insurance exchanges will have access to additional coverage from their state’s Medicaid program if they get pregnant. Some women could save hundreds of dollars on their share of hospital and doctor bills. Medicaid already pays for nearly half of U.S. births, but this would create a way for the safety-net program to supplement private insurance for many expectant mothers. Officials and advocates say the enhanced coverage will be...

Obamacare has made drastic changes in Medicare procedures for obtaining durable medical equipment (DME) for home health services. Most patients will not be aware of the hidden new rules until they are hit with higher costs or denial of services or needed supplies. Medicare's new rules cut prices by 45 percent below the current fee schedule, on average, and 72 percent below current rates for diabetic supplies. What reputable business can survive a 45 percent or 72 percent cut in revenue? When patients' home health services are cut, the hardest hit are patients with chronic lung disease, congestive heart failure,...

Spending on health care grew an astounding 9.9% in the Bureau of Economic Analysis' advance estimate of first-quarter GDP. It's the biggest percent change in health-care spending since 1980, when health-care spending jumped 10% in the third quarter. Analysts said it's primarily due to a consumption boost from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Adjusted for inflation, America is spending more on health care than ever before.Personal consumption grew by 3.0%, about half of which was due to the growth in health-care spending, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. "If health-care spending had been unchanged, the headline GDP growth number would have...

Via BuzzFeed, deep thoughts from Rep. Bennie Thompson, adding his two cents on a Nation of Islam radio show to the characteristically thoughtful Conversation About Race that America’s having this week. It’s fun listening to this on the same day that Chris Lehane is defending the memo he wrote for the Clinton White House nearly 20 years ago about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was out to take down Billary. Every Democratic president, it seems, is the subject of unprecedented conservative vitriol, although Clinton at least could point to his eventual impeachment as evidence that it was true. Thompson’s case...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has improperly paid millions of dollars to Medicare Advantage organizations on behalf of illegal immigrants. In a new report released Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed that for calendar years 2010 through 2012, CMS provided $26.2 million in improper payments to Medicare Advantage organizations for 1,600 “unlawfully present beneficiaries” — or nearly $16,375 per illegal immigrant.

SCIENCE! It turns out that the latest study of the effectiveness of Medicare on patient health is non-existent. Here's the summary from the New England Journal of Medicine: CONCLUSIONS This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain. Like a child's security blanket, it made people who had it feel better for having it.

Four years after Obamacare became law, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is notifying Medicare providers and suppliers of new fingerprint-based background checks. Eventually, all individuals who hold a five percent or greater stake in a Medicare supplier or provider that is categorized as "high risk" will be subject to the requirement. The provision is part of the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP Program Integrity Provisions (Title E) of the Affordable Care Act, and gives the HHS secretary broad discretion in applying the background check requirements depending on the potential for abuse, fraud, and/or waste. The new requirements are...

The federal Medicare health insurance program winds up paying the fare for many of the ambulance rides provided by the city of St. Paul. That's why the city in 2012 was one of the largest single recipients of Medicare payments among non-hospital health care providers in the state, according to data released this month by the federal government. Out of more than 19,000 health care providers during 2012 who cared for Medicare patients in Minnesota, the city's take of more than $2 million was the ninth largest individual sum. Whether they were providing ambulance rides or treating illnesses, the state's...

Lost in the overall shuffle concerning the many problems with Obamacare’s exchanges is the central problem of enforcement of those aspects of the law the president hasn’t waived or delayed yet – including the particular challenge when it comes to verifying the immigration status of those applying for taxpayer subsidized insurance. On April 1st, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a new guidance document to health insurers. The CMS guidance says that people whose immigration status is uncertain will be presumed eligible for subsidized coverage in Obamacare’s marketplaces while a further review is pending. Emphasis mine: If there...

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system. But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best. But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that...

Earlier this week, the Medicare system for the first time released a list of its payments to individual doctors, showing that just a few doctors accounted for a huge fraction of Medicare payments. As Frances Robles and Eric Lipton of The Times reported on Thursday, two of those doctors had given lavishly to Democratic politicians in hopes of getting Medicare investigators off their backs. The country’s top recipient of Medicare dollars was Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist who has been repeatedly investigated for overbilling the government for an eye medication. In 2012, he received $21 million in Medicare reimbursements....

The Florida doctor who entangled Sen. Robert Menendez in an FBI investigation also turns out to be the nation’s No. 1 recipient of Medicare funds. Dr. Salomon Melgin, the Florida eye surgeon, charged the government $320 for giving 37,075 injections of an eye-drug to 645 patients. That’s an average of 57 injections per patient, costing the taxpayer $21 million in 2012. The data was buried in an April 9 release of Medicare data by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Studies. The wealthy doctor lives in a palatial house in in North Palm Beach, and donated heavily to Menendez. He’s...

The top 1% of 825,000 individual medical providers accounted for 14% of the $77 billion in medicare billing in 2012, according to new federal data reported by the WSJ. The data shows a very small number of doctors and medical providers account for a huge amount of the costs for treating the elderly... One researcher summed it up, "There's all sorts of services that are low-value for patients, high-revenue to providers," and leaves us wondering, once again, how the government will manage as Obamacare's "success" washes ashore. A doctor who treats a degenerative eye disease in seniors was paid $21...

(Reuters) :snip: After decades of litigation and over the strenuous objections of the American Medical Association, the leading U.S. doctors group, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Wednesday made public for the first time how much Medicare pays individual doctors. The massive data release, totaling nearly 10 million lines, also includes which medical services each of more than 880,000 physicians and other healthcare providers nationwide billed Medicare for in 2012. :snip: Last December, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, CMS's parent agency, found that 303 clinicians each collected more than $3...

And here I bet some of you thought the 2013 elections were over, didn’t you? Well, they were for the most part, but given the variations in election laws and special circumstances from state to state, there’s always some action brewing someplace. In this case, the congressional seat in Louisiana’s 5th district was open due to Republican Rodney Alexander’s resignation earlier this year to take a job with the Jindal administration. That required a special election, which began earlier this fall. Because of Louisiana’s somewhat unique election structure and the fact that nobody got more than 50% of the vote,...

Vance McAlliser, one of two candidates in a runoff for Congressman from Louisiana’s Fifth District, said yesterday that he supported a “path to citizenship” for aliens that are in the United States illegally. Path to Citizenship is considered by most conservatives to be a politically correct term for amnesty for illegals. From the News Star: And on immigration reform, McAllister said he would support a path to citizenship for those immigrants already here illegally. “We have to secure the borders, but (citizenship) has to be attainable for those people already here,” he said. “It has to be a tough path,...

Hours after political unknown Vance McAllister pulled off a startling upset Saturday night in the special election for Congress in Louisiana's 5th District, pundits and pols were scrambling to figure out how he did it — and whether a trend of "Mr. Outside" and "Miss Outside" defeating established politicians in Republican primaries has begun for 2014. "The election of Vance McAllister to Congress in Louisiana's 5th District reflects the appeal of being an outsider in today's poisonous political environment," Mark Kennedy, former Republican congressman from Minnesota and director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, told...