Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Obamacare closes another hospital...Next is the hospital near you!


If it happened there! It can happen in the hospital near your home as well! Obamacare closing hospitals, causing unemployment, and killing patients that now have to travel great distances to receive care!

Fourth Georgia hospital closes due to Obamacare payment cuts

Sarah Hurtubise from the Daily Caller

02/19/2014

The fourth Georgia hospital in two years is closing its doors due to severe financial difficulties caused by Obamacare’s payment cuts for emergency services.

The Lower Oconee Community Hospital is, for now, a critical access hospital in southeastern Georgia that holds 25 beds. The hospital is suffering from serious cash-flow problems, largely due to the area’s 23 percent uninsured population, and hopes to reopen as “some kind of urgent care center,” CEO Karen O’Neal said.

Many hospitals in the 25 states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are facing similar financial problems. Liberal administration ally Think Progress has already faulted Georgia for not expanding Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned.

But the reality is more complicated. The federal government has historically made payments to hospitals to cover the cost of uninsured patients seeking free medical care in emergency rooms, as federal law mandates that hospitals must care for all patients regardless of their ability to pay.

Because the Affordable Care Act’s authors believed they’d forced all states to implement the Medicaid expansion, Obamacare vastly cut hospital payments, the Associated Press reports.

The Supreme Court ruled that states could reject the Medicaid expansion in 2012, as part of the decision that upheld Obamacare generally. Since that decision, the Obama administration has so far instituted 28 unilateral delays and changes to the health care law’s implementation without congressional approval, Fox Business reports.

From verifying eligibility for subsidies to enforcing employer requirements, the Obama administration has already taken a hacksaw to the health care reform law, but it has made no changes to the provision raising problems for half the nation’s hospitals.

While the feds wait for financial pressure to force states to act, several state governments have been taking things into their own hands. Some have criticized these moves as “hospital bailouts.”

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Once Obamacare is gone, and it will be going….the ACO approach will gain traction!


Now…All we have to do is cut out Malpractice lawyers! This approach will change the standard of care, and put the patient’s treatment in the hands of a team, and not a single physician!

 
Doctors Rush To Obamacare's Accountable Care Approach



Forbes 4/27/2013

The number of physicians participating in the emerging medical care delivery system known as “accountable care organizations” (ACOs) has tripled as the health care industry moves further away from fee-for-service medicine.

A new study from Medscape said one in four doctors, or 24 percent, “were either in an ACO or planned to be in an ACO within a year.” By comparison, only 8 percent of physicians in Medscape’s 2012 report were in or planning to be in an ACO. The report included more than 21,000 doctor respondents across 25 specialties.

“There’s a dramatic change in the number of physicians who are becoming involved in Accountable Care Organizations,” the report said. “The focus on ACOs as a care-delivery and cost-containment method is making an impact.”

ACOs, which reward doctors and hospitals for working together to improve quality and to control costs, need doctors to be a quarterback of sorts in using nurses and other caregivers to manage the medical-care of populations of patients.

ACOs link medical care providers together to improve quality. If the providers in the ACO achieve better outcomes, they divvy up money saved with the health plans.

“ACOs are being looked to as one of the tools for lowering the cost of healthcare,” said Leslie Kane, executive editor of Medscape Business of Medicine.

“ACOs can encompass new payment models for certain health conditions, such as bundled payments,” Kane added. “In a bundled payment, the ACO receives one set payment for a particular patient’s ‘episode of care.’   And whichever doctors see or perform services on that patient, they will all share in that set payment.”

The Medscape report is different than others of late in that it looked at physicians. A report earlier this year from consulting firm Oliver Wyman said the ACO approach is also gaining momentum among U.S. consumers, employers and insurers, saying more than half the U.S. population has access to ACOs.

ACOs last year began providing medical care services to seniors through contracts with the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly. In addition, most private health insurance companies, too, such as those operated by Aetna AET +0.23% (AET), Cigna CI +0.39% (CI), Humana HUM +0.56% (HUM), UnitedHealth Group UNH +1.09% (UNH), Wellpoint (WLP) as well as Blue Cross plans linking with ACOS to care for more patients.

Earlier this week, the New York Times followed up on a story the newspaper wrote about a year ago that featured an effort by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois that is achieving some success in how it pays a Chicago-based healthcare system. Advocate Health Care is reducing hospital admissions, the insurer and provider said.

A health plan contracts with doctors and hospitals through an ACO which pushes high quality, less expensive treatment rather than today’s payment system that often leads to excessive treatment by paying for each procedure that isn’t always necessarily better. The providers in an ACO are responsible for managing the care of the health plan enrollees and are financially rewarded if the enrollees, or patients, stay out of the more expensive hospital.

“Another reason the government is promoting them is that there is the strong hope that they will improve coordination of care for patients, so that it may cut down on duplication of tests, etc.,” Medscape’s Kane said. “There is also the opportunity with ACOs that if the organization comes in ‘under budget’ for its patient care, physicians will be able to share in the profits that are available. Many areas are racing to set up ACOs, and doctors feel that if they don’t get into them, they may get shut out of a potential patient pool.”