The healthcare industry is currently in an era of higher copays and deductibles, and effective patient collections are critical to the financial health of practices. The front desk staff of a practice is the first area to help with patient satisfaction and the key to a healthy revenue cycle. This front desk staff must collect…
NEW YORK (Reuters)—The number of consumers who signed up for 2018 Obamacare health insurance next year surpassed the 1 million mark in the second-to-last week of enrollment on the federally-run HealthCare.gov website, picking up the pace ahead of the December 15 deadline. Through December 9, 4.68 million consumers signed up for the insurance in the 39 states…
Sandra Mintz, MSN, RN, knew in high school that she wanted to be a nurse, and upon graduation, she did just that, the youngest in her class to graduate from Pasadena City College with an Associate of Science in nursing. Not long after embarking on her career, she received a life-altering medical diagnosis of her…
Greetings, advocates! This month’s Washington update covers how Congress’s tax proposals affect rheumatology, the ACR’s plan to fight Medicare’s adjustments to Part B drug costs in MIPS, the good news of Medicare’s new individualized biosimilar reimbursement, advances in the rheumatology-specific Alternative Payment Model and developments in Congress’s awareness about the perilous pharmacy benefit manager system….
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—More than 800,000 people signed up for Obamacare individual health insurance plans in the second week of open enrollment, U.S. government health officials said on Wednesday, bringing the total number of sign-ups to nearly 1.5 million so far. There is particular scrutiny of how Affordable Care Act programs are faring after a year in…
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—The head of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee proposed major changes to a Republican tax reform plan, adding a repeal of Obamacare’s health insurance mandate and making corporate tax cuts permanent while ending individual cuts in 2025. In a statement late on Tuesday, committee chairman Orrin Hatch said the proposed changes would also slightly…
Beginning in April 2018, Medicare patients will receive newly designed Medicare identification cards that replace their Social Security numbers (SSNs) with unique, randomly assigned, alphanumeric identification numbers. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is making the change to protect patients 65 and older from exposing their SSNs in efforts to “help prevent fraud,…
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday said that repealing the individual mandate for health insurance would reduce the federal budget deficit less than first forecast as it readied a revised analysis of a policy shift favored by Republicans. The CBO, the nonpartisan budget-scoring agency, said in a statement on its website that eliminating the…
Every day, more than 5 million records are lost or stolen. That’s more than 217,000 records per hour, 3,600 records per minute and 60 records every second. Due to increasingly sophisticated hacking tactics and ransomware, it’s anticipated that the number of reported breaches will continue to rise at an accelerated rate. In August, the list…
NEW YORK (Reuters)—President Donald Trump’s 90% cut to Obamacare advertising has U.S. health insurers in many states digging deeper into their pockets to get the word out about 2018 enrollment, which opened last week. Independence Blue Cross, a health insurer in Pennsylvania, has commissioned a tractor-trailer truck to bring insurance consultants out to shopping centers…