Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Robert Pear, New York Times, Feb.21/22, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday proposed cuts in Medicare payment rates for managed-care plans serving more than one-fourth of all beneficiaries, and Republicans immediately pounced on the proposal, which appears likely to become a significant issue in this year’s midterm elections.
The proposed reductions were larger than the administration had indicated in guidance given to the insurance industry in December. Jonathan Blum, a top Medicare official, cited the “historically low growth in Medicare per capita spending” as a reason for the proposal.
But Republicans said beneficiaries would suffer as a result of the cuts, which they traced to the Affordable Care Act [....]
The announcement late Friday is likely to reverberate on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill, where insurers, employers and beneficiaries plan to lobby against the cuts. That effort was so intense last year that the Obama administration reversed itself, scrapped plans for a cut and increased rates instead [....]
Comments
by artappraiser on Sat, 02/22/2014 - 10:29am
by artappraiser on Sat, 02/22/2014 - 11:38am
by artappraiser on Sat, 02/22/2014 - 11:12am
There is also lots of news about Medicare and painkillers owing to a new Harvard study that says 1/3 of Medicare patients are being prescribed them by multiple doctors. (Thereby also bringing up the topic of lack of managed care of prescriptions with Medicare fee-for-service, where patients can visit many doctors without anyone but the patient coordinating treatments):
The following article used data from a Pro Publica study of all Medicare prescriptions to apply it to the state of Nevada on the topic of pain killers (lots of charts @ the link) but also gets at the link between the feature/bug of fee-for-service that it encourages "money-driven-medicine," in this case, selling drugs to the Medicare public:
by artappraiser on Sat, 02/22/2014 - 11:57am