The U.S. Senate yesterday, by a 78-19 vote, passed the $10 billion Temporary Extension Act of 2010, which includes a provision that delays a 21.2 percent Medicare payment reduction to physicians until the end of March. The House of Representatives passed the legislation last week.
The Senate Finance Committee voted today in favor of its version of proposed healthcare reform legislation in a 14-9 vote, including the approval of Olympia Snowe, R.-Me.
The medical devices industry is lobbying heavily to reduce a projected $4 billion annual tax on medical device makers included in the Senate Finance Committee healthcare reform bill, according to media reports.
The healthcare reform bill approved last week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee contained an amendment prohibiting the federal government from using comparative-effectiveness research to “deny or ration care.”
President Barack Obama Sunday released plans to cut in half the prescription drug expenses of Medicare Part D beneficiaries who have reached the coverage gap (doughnut hole) in their prescription benefit. Simultaneously, pharmaceutical companies have agreed to foot the bill for $80 billion in Medicare drugs over the next decade for this population.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, led by Chairman Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., introduced legislation this week advocating for more government involvement in healthcare coverage. The bill is certain to launch a drawn-out debate over the current delivery direction of healthcare in the United States when it is introduced on the Senate floor in July.
Thursday, May 07 2009
GE today launched a new healthcare business strategy, healthymagination, dedicating $6 billion to preventive care and consumer-driven initiatives. The new strategy was announced in a live webcast, hosted by Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE.
Imaging provisions contained in the Senate Finance Committee's proposals for healthcare delivery reform are "forward-thinking" policies that will ensure proper diagnostic imaging utilization over the long term, according to the Access to Medical Imaging Coalition (AMIC).
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a report approximating the costs of the current updated economic stimulus package currently being debated in the Senate, as well as estimating its assistance to the U.S. healthcare system.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., released a “Call to Action” plan on Wednesday, detailing his vision for health reform in the 111th Congress, which highlights access to care, unsustainable costs and a lack of quality assurances that currently plague the U.S. healthcare system.
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The U.S. Senate Tuesday, by a 78-19 vote, passed the $10 billion Temporary Extension Act of 2010, which includes a provision that delays a 21.2 percent Medicare payment reduction to physicians until the end of March. The House of Representatives passed the legislation last week.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation have released a preliminary analysis of the Senate healthcare reform legislation, Chairman’s Mark for the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009, estimating the bill would reduce federal budget deficits by $81 billion over the 2010–2019 period.
The Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., issued its long-awaited America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 on Wednesday, which would cost $856 billion over 10 years, and is scheduled to begin committee action on Sept. 22.
A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released June 22 has revealed that "significant gaps" in access to screening and treatment services for breast and cervical cancer exist both between states and within states, according to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Advocacy Alliance.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., introduced legislation to establish a private, nonprofit corporation that will research and compare clinical outcomes of alternative therapies and health strategies.
Healthcare reform cannot survive on expanding coverage alone; it requires promoting best practices to fix what is broken, wrote President Barack Obama in a letter sent June 2 to Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Max Baucus, D-Mont.,--the two key stakeholders who have been at odds over the payor component of the administration's healthcare reform plan.
An average of 14,000 Americans lose health coverage each day, healthcare insurance premiums grow more than three times faster than wages and physician reimbursement has declined by more than 20 percent in the past eight years. Couple these sad statistics with a demographic shift that will see an ever increasing number of U.S. citizens eligible for, and needing services from, Medicare and it becomes clear that present healthcare delivery policies are quickly becoming fiscally unsustainable.
In the first of three roundtables on healthcare delivery system reform held by the Senate Finance Committee, participants this week discussed increasing primary care physician payments by reducing payments to imaging services providers.
Medicare Part A payments for conditions like heart attacks and other illnesses may soon be linked to hospital performance on a variety of quality measures, according to a discussion draft of a bill proposed by Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.
When officials at Howard Memorial Hospital in Nashville, Ark., started drawing up plans for a new facility that opened in July 2009, Cindy York, the hospital’s director of radiology, had to make some decisions.