Aging
At Teaching Hospitals, Aggressive Screening May Lead To Medicare Penalties
CHICAGO — The puffiness along Carol Ascher’s left leg seemed like normal swelling, probably from the high dose of chemotherapy Dr. Karl Bilimoria had injected the previous day. But it could have been a blood clot. He quickly ordered an ultrasound. “We were just being abundantly cautious,” he said. Such vigilance is a point of […]
Medicare Delays Plans For New Star Ratings On Hospitals After Congressional Pressure
Bowing to pressure from the hospital industry and Congress, the Obama administration on Wednesday delayed releasing its new hospital quality rating measure just a day before its planned launch. The new “overall hospital quality” star rating aimed to combine the government’s disparate efforts to measure hospital care into one easy-to-grasp metric. The Centers for Medicare […]
Hospital Discharge: It’s One Of The Most Dangerous Periods For Patients
Within two weeks of Joyce Oyler’s discharge from the hospital, sores developed in her mouth and throat, and blood began seeping from her nose and bowels. Her daughter traced the source to the medicine bottles in Oyler’s home in St. Joseph, Missouri. One drug that keeps heart patients like Oyler from retaining fluids was missing. […]
Para muchos pacientes que salen de terapia intensiva, la lucha apenas comienza
El accidente ocurrió en Pittsburgh el 16 de noviembre. Joseph Masterson, un abogado que estaba a pocos días de jubilarse a los 63 años, sufrió un paro cardíaco mientras conducía: chocó contra una barrera de contención y perdió el conocimiento. Otros conductores se detuvieron, rompieron la ventana del auto y lo llevaron a un lugar […]
Doctors’ House Calls Saving Money For Medicare
Looking for ways to save money and improve care, Medicare officials are returning to an old-fashioned idea: house calls. But the experiment, called Independence at Home, is more than a nostalgic throwback to the way medicine was practiced decades ago when the doctor arrived at the patient’s door carrying a big black bag. Done right […]
Medicare’s Efforts To Curb Backlog Of Appeals Not Sufficient, GAO Reports
Despite interventions by Medicare officials, the number of appeals from health care providers and patients challenging denied claims continues to spiral, increasing the backlog of cases and delaying many decisions well beyond the timeframes set by law, according to a government study released Thursday. The report from the Government Accountability Office, said the backlog “shows […]
Colon Cancer Screening: Five Things To Know
Story updated at 10:02 am It’s a predictable passage in life: Hit 50, get lots birthday cards with old-age jokes, a mailbox full of AARP solicitations — and a colonoscopy. But millions of Americans — about one-third of those in the recommended age range for colon cancer screening — haven’t been tested. Some avoid it […]
HHS Proposes To Streamline Medicare Appeals Process
The Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday proposed key changes in the Medicare appeals process to help reduce the backlog of more than 700,000 cases. The measures “will help us get a leg up on this problem,” said Nancy Griswold, chief law judge of the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals. If there was […]
Catastrophic Insurance Could Help With Long-Term Care Expenses: Studies
As aging baby boomers swell the ranks of elderly Americans, we’re nowhere near a solution to providing the long-term care services many of them will need. Researchers at the Urban Institute have been examining the spending tradeoffs between two public long-term care insurance programs: a catastrophic plan and a short-term plan that would pay benefits […]
Younger Seniors Amass More End-Of-Life Care Than Oldest Americans, Study Finds
Americans in their 80s and 90s are not the ones amassing the largest medical bills to hold off death, according to a new analysis that challenges a widely held belief about the costs of end-of-life care. Younger seniors — those with potentially longer expectancies — are. Medicare claims data for 2014 for beneficiaries who died the same […]