Tags:
Sunday, July 29, 2007
CBO: CHAMP Act Slashes Seniors' Nursing Home Care 2.7 Billion Dollars Over Five Years, USA
Despite the effort by the House Ways and Means Committee to spin the hastily-crafted Children's Health and Medicare Protection Act of 2007 (CHAMP Act) as beneficial to "America's Greatest Generation," new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, in fact, has determined that the nation's oldest, highest acuity nursing home residents will suffer Medicare Part A budget cuts of $2.7 billion over five years, prompting the American Health Care Association (AHCA) to question why this highly vulnerable population has been singled out for the highest level of cuts.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Coverage is Critical to Care
This site has information about a campaign to assure health care coverage to all direct care workers. Only 2 in 5 have such coverage, an appalling irony.
Take a look and think about participating in the campaign.
Take a look and think about participating in the campaign.
Tags:
AHCA/NCAL Applauds Introduction Of Long Term Care Act, USA
The American Health Care Association (AHCA) and National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) praised the efforts of Senator John Thune (R-SD) and Representative Lee Terry (R-NE) for introducing The Long-Term Care Act of 2007 in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation would allow individuals to use, without penalty, pre-tax dollars from individual retirement accounts (IRAs) as well as other retirement savings plans to purchase qualified long term care insurance.
Tags:
National Hotline Expands To Assist Professionals With Clients' Full Array Of Medicare Questions And Problems, USA
he Medicare Rights Center's Professional Hotline is now providing comprehensive guidance on a complete spectrum of Medicare benefits, rights and options to professionals who assist older adults and people with disabilities who have Medicare.
Tags:
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Note to Medicaid Patients:
From the Wall Street Journal
Note to Medicaid Patients:
The Doctor Won't See You
As Program Cuts Fees,
MDs Drop Out; Hurdle
For Expansion of Care
By VANESSA FUHRMANS
July 19, 2007; Page A1
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. -- Medicaid provides health-care coverage for millions of Americans -- but a growing number of doctors won't accept it.
In February, Jada Garrett, a 16-year-old sophomore, developed what seemed at first a mild case of strep throat. Within a couple of weeks her joints ballooned. Many afternoons, her swollen ankles hurt too much to walk.
INSURANCE ADJUSTMENTS
• The Situation: The number of doctors who will accept Medicaid patients is dwindling.
• The Background: Straining under higher costs, Medicaid has been freezing or slashing fees to doctors.
• What's at Stake: The issue could be a hurdle to some states' efforts to broaden health-care coverage by expanding Medicaid eligibility.
To get to the bottom of her symptoms, Jada needed to see a rheumatologist. But the local one listed in her Medicaid plan's network wouldn't see her in his office. The wait to get into a clinic was more than three months. By the time she found a rheumatologist in a nearby county to take her in mid-April, Jada's debilitating pain had caused her to miss several weeks of school.
"You feel so helpless thinking, something's wrong with this child and I can't even get her into a doctor," says Jada's mother, Nicole Garrett, who enrolled her three teenage daughters in Medicaid after they lost private coverage. "When we had real insurance, we could call and come in at the drop of a hat."
On paper, Jada's Medicaid coverage is real insurance. Funded jointly by states and the federal government, the safety-net program is intended to provide comprehensive health-care coverage for more than 50 million Americans too poor or disabled to afford it elsewhere. Like the majority of Medicaid recipients in Michigan, Jada receives her benefits through a private health-maintenance organization contracted by Medicaid to administer the program.
[Nicole Garrett]
But when Medicaid patients seek care, they often find themselves locked out of the medical system. In a 2006 report from the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, nearly half of all doctors polled said they had stopped accepting or limited the number of new Medicaid patients.
That's because many Medicaid programs, straining under surging costs, are balancing their budgets by freezing or reducing payments to doctors. That in turn is driving many doctors, particularly specialists, out of the program.
The dwindling number of doctors who accept Medicaid is a large, little-discussed hurdle to some ambitious efforts to broaden health-care coverage. Expanding Medicaid eligibility or using the private Medicaid HMOs is a linchpin in universal-coverage initiatives in Massachusetts and other states -- as well as some 2008 presidential candidates' platforms.
In California, a key component of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's universal coverage proposal calls for a controversial 2% to 4% surcharge on doctors' and hospitals' revenues. The money would be used to pay for higher Medicaid fees so that doctors will take in more enrollees. About 51% of family physicians in California participate in Medicaid. For a number of specialties, such as orthopedic surgery, the percentage is much lower, according to the California HealthCare Foundation.
Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, is also pushing a plan to extend coverage to more than 500,000 of the state's uninsured. Because physician groups have balked at taking more people at Medicaid-level reimbursements, policy makers hope the new program will pay doctors rates similar to Medicare -- about two-thirds higher than Medicaid. But many people fear that will give doctors even less reason to accept people on Medicaid.
In Michigan, the number of doctors who will see Medicaid patients has fallen from 88% in 1999 to 64% in 2005. Many of those doctors tightly cap how many they'll see or refuse to take on new Medicaid patients. At the same time, enrollment in the program in Michigan has risen more than 50% to nearly 1.6 million since 1999.
Paul Reinhart, the state's Medicaid director, says he doesn't believe difficulties finding specialists is a pervasive issue. But he acknowledges that patients can run into access problems. "That's a problem that we're working on and one that probably can only really be resolved with increased [fees]," he says. To safeguard against access problems, his agency requires the plans to have at least one primary-care physician for every 750 people in a given region. The program also checks a few times a year whether the specialists listed in the plans' networks are indeed available.
"At this point, I have to pay money out of my own pocket to take care of that [Medicaid] patient, and it's only going to get worse," says AppaRao Mukkamala, president of the Michigan State Medical Society and a radiologist in Flint, Mich. There, auto-industry layoffs have helped push one in five people onto Medicaid or into the ranks of the uninsured.
For every chest X-ray Dr. Mukkamala performs, for instance, Medicaid pays him $20. Commercial insurers such as Blue Cross pay about $33 and Medicare pays $30. But with technicians, film and other equipment, his costs are about $29 per X-ray, he estimates. Medicaid patients he sees at Hurley Medical Center in Flint make up 28% of his work there.
Like many states, Michigan hires private Medicaid HMOs to administer benefits. The state pays HMOs a monthly fee for each patient. The HMOs then pay doctors, usually amounts close to government-set payments. As in many states, the managed-care plans win Medicaid contracts based partly on how robust their networks of doctors and hospitals are.
The HMOs' directories of network providers in Michigan seem full, but phone calls to listed specialists in some places find big holes. The three HMOs which operate in the county around Benton Harbor -- Community Choice, Great Lakes Health Plan and Health Plan of Michigan -- post on their Web sites lists of local specialists participating in their network.
Of the 11 obstetrician-gynecologists that Community Choice lists for Berrien County, four doctors said they were listed in error, and another one no longer practices in the area. One took only Medicaid patients referred to her by doctors within her practice. Three others were only seeing new Medicaid patients at a nearby clinic, not in their offices. And two more were taking patients at the same clinic.
Many doctors on Health Plan of Michigan's list, which includes many of the same names, had similar restrictions. Great Lakes' Web site noted that none of the six on its ob-gyn list were accepting new patients.
[Fee Disparity]
All three HMOs' listed gastroenterologists -- another high-demand specialist area -- only saw Medicaid patients at an offsite clinic where appointment waits can be three to nine months.
The health plans say they encourage members and their referring doctors to call them if they have trouble getting an appointment with a specialist. "We can't just rely on what's in the directory -- it would be our obligation to help any member," says Pamela Morris, president of CareSource Management Group, which manages Community Choice's health plan. She adds that a wait of several months is "unacceptable." The company says that all of the doctors in its directory are indeed contracted with it. It says sometimes staff at medical practices make mistakes about what plans they accept.
Health Plan of Michigan's chief operating officer, Shery Cotton, says that in some places, it will pay doctors bonuses to encourage them to see ob-gyn patients. It also periodically checks in with primary doctors to see if their Medicaid patients are being refused by specialists. And it doesn't require plan members to use just network doctors.
But Ms. Cotton acknowledges that low reimbursements from the state sometimes make raising participation a struggle: "We literally get on the phone with doctors and beg, 'Will you see this patient?'"
Steve Matthews, a spokesman for AmeriChoice, the Medicaid arm of UnitedHealth Group Inc., which owns Great Lakes Health Plan, said that the plan's customer-service records don't show a doctor-access problem in Benton Harbor. He added that if a patient has difficulty, the company will help set up an appointment "anywhere in the state, regardless of whether they're in the network." Many primary-care doctors, however, say they don't have the time or resources to call the plans for all of the patients for whom they have trouble finding referrals.
Robert Ward III, a neurologist in nearby St. Joseph, says the only new Medicaid patients his practice now sees are those who were admitted to the local hospital first. Occasionally, he will see a patient referred by a doctor he knows. But all three of the local Medicaid HMOs have Dr. Ward listed as a network provider -- only Great Lakes Health Plan's Web site notes that he isn't accepting new patients. Dr. Ward says his office has pointed this out to the Medicaid plans.
When he started his practice in the early 1990s, Dr. Ward says he placed no limits and Medicaid patients flocked to his practice. Medicaid patients soon ballooned to 35% of his roster.
"It was a rookie mistake," says Dr. Ward, one of only two full-time neurologists in the tri-county area.
Commercial health plans such as Blue Cross pay him between $72 and $85 for a typical neurological exam. He receives about $31 from the Medicaid plans. Now, 12% of his patients are on Medicaid.
Southwestern Medical Clinic, a multispecialty group, sees some Medicaid patients in its offices across the county because of its involvement in Christian-based medical mission work. That group now accounts for some 20% of the clinic's patient mix. Yet the clinic limits many appointments to Medicaid patients who live in the same or surrounding ZIP codes of its various branches.
"We don't want people driving past their community provider to come see us," says Kenneth O'Neill, Southwestern's medical director. "Otherwise the model of everyone doing their fair share starts to fall apart."
Delays in getting treatment can have serious consequences. Jennifer Kinchen, 47, enrolled in Medicaid in late 2005, after Hurricane Katrina forced her to leave her home in Louisiana and move near family in Benton Harbor. Since late last year, she has suffered from tremors severe enough to cause her to drop her coffee mug or sometimes fall, liver problems and high levels of ammonia in her blood.
Her family doctor has searched and waited to get her an appointment with a neurologist or gastroenterologist. In the meantime, Ms. Kinchen has gone to the emergency room a few times because of dehydration and blacking out.
In Benton Harbor, more than 300 patients lost access to counseling services after the main provider of Medicaid mental-health services, Riverwood Center, stopped accepting payments from Medicaid HMOs. Riverwood says the reimbursements it was receiving from the Medicaid HMOs for outpatient sessions didn't cover their costs.
Payment delays and other administrative hassles compounded the crunch, says Riverwood's president, Allen Edlefson. The center lost $350,000 in 2003, the year before it decided to quit its Medicaid HMO contracts. "It was a painful decision, but we just couldn't make it work financially," he says.
The Medicaid HMOs helped slow costs by more tightly managing care, such as reducing hospital admissions and assuring that recipients are at least assigned a primary-care doctor. The state estimates HMOs have saved Medicaid more than $300 million annually in recent years.
Nestled along Lake Michigan's southeastern shore, Benton Harbor has been hard hit by job losses. Manufacturers have steadily cut or relocated elsewhere good-paying union jobs with health benefits. About a quarter of the community of 12,000, poor and predominantly black, are unemployed.
As the city's middle class dwindled, most doctors, along with the hospital, relocated in the late 1980s and early 1990s across the St. Joseph River to its much more affluent twin, St. Joseph, a picturesque lake-resort town. Most of those doctors are listed in HMO networks but many don't accept Medicaid patients in their offices. Instead, many spend an afternoon every one or two weeks seeing Medicaid patients at a clinic set up in a building that once housed Benton Harbor's hospital.
[Don Tynes]
The doctors say they prefer the arrangement because the clinic -- which is run by the St. Joseph hospital -- pays them a flat rate for the afternoon, instead of Medicaid fees for each service. They don't have to worry about the administrative hassle of filing claims or no-show patients -- a common problem since many Medicaid recipients don't have ready transportation. But for patients, this can mean waiting months for an appointment.
The specialist crunch means that more of the burden is falling on primary-care physicians such as Don Tynes. Dr. Tynes runs one of the few primary-care practices left in Benton Harbor. Three years ago, he left his job as a salaried physician in a local community health center to set up his own practice in a former dry-cleaning shop across from Benton Harbor high school.
"I don't want to pull any punches taking care of people," says Dr. Tynes. "I'm a spiritual man, not a businessman." In his waiting room, gospel movies play round the clock on a DVD player and patients can sign up for his weight-loss coaching.
On a recent day, 22 out of the 37 patients were on Medicaid, and another 12 had Medicare or other government-sponsored insurance. Only three had commercial health coverage. Dr. Tynes tries to make ends meet with a bare-bones staff. He has also cultivated a loyal patient base by offering specialty services such as sexual-dysfunction treatment and marriage counseling. Depending on how good business is, he tries to pay himself an after-tax salary of $500 to $750 a week to support his family of five children.
But three times so far this year, he's forgone his biweekly paycheck to keep the practice out of the red. Last year, he cut his office staff from seven to four people. "We [primary-care physicians] are the ones keeping this Medicaid system together, but we're the ones getting killed," he says.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com
Note to Medicaid Patients:
The Doctor Won't See You
As Program Cuts Fees,
MDs Drop Out; Hurdle
For Expansion of Care
By VANESSA FUHRMANS
July 19, 2007; Page A1
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. -- Medicaid provides health-care coverage for millions of Americans -- but a growing number of doctors won't accept it.
In February, Jada Garrett, a 16-year-old sophomore, developed what seemed at first a mild case of strep throat. Within a couple of weeks her joints ballooned. Many afternoons, her swollen ankles hurt too much to walk.
INSURANCE ADJUSTMENTS
• The Situation: The number of doctors who will accept Medicaid patients is dwindling.
• The Background: Straining under higher costs, Medicaid has been freezing or slashing fees to doctors.
• What's at Stake: The issue could be a hurdle to some states' efforts to broaden health-care coverage by expanding Medicaid eligibility.
To get to the bottom of her symptoms, Jada needed to see a rheumatologist. But the local one listed in her Medicaid plan's network wouldn't see her in his office. The wait to get into a clinic was more than three months. By the time she found a rheumatologist in a nearby county to take her in mid-April, Jada's debilitating pain had caused her to miss several weeks of school.
"You feel so helpless thinking, something's wrong with this child and I can't even get her into a doctor," says Jada's mother, Nicole Garrett, who enrolled her three teenage daughters in Medicaid after they lost private coverage. "When we had real insurance, we could call and come in at the drop of a hat."
On paper, Jada's Medicaid coverage is real insurance. Funded jointly by states and the federal government, the safety-net program is intended to provide comprehensive health-care coverage for more than 50 million Americans too poor or disabled to afford it elsewhere. Like the majority of Medicaid recipients in Michigan, Jada receives her benefits through a private health-maintenance organization contracted by Medicaid to administer the program.
[Nicole Garrett]
But when Medicaid patients seek care, they often find themselves locked out of the medical system. In a 2006 report from the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, nearly half of all doctors polled said they had stopped accepting or limited the number of new Medicaid patients.
That's because many Medicaid programs, straining under surging costs, are balancing their budgets by freezing or reducing payments to doctors. That in turn is driving many doctors, particularly specialists, out of the program.
The dwindling number of doctors who accept Medicaid is a large, little-discussed hurdle to some ambitious efforts to broaden health-care coverage. Expanding Medicaid eligibility or using the private Medicaid HMOs is a linchpin in universal-coverage initiatives in Massachusetts and other states -- as well as some 2008 presidential candidates' platforms.
In California, a key component of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's universal coverage proposal calls for a controversial 2% to 4% surcharge on doctors' and hospitals' revenues. The money would be used to pay for higher Medicaid fees so that doctors will take in more enrollees. About 51% of family physicians in California participate in Medicaid. For a number of specialties, such as orthopedic surgery, the percentage is much lower, according to the California HealthCare Foundation.
Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, is also pushing a plan to extend coverage to more than 500,000 of the state's uninsured. Because physician groups have balked at taking more people at Medicaid-level reimbursements, policy makers hope the new program will pay doctors rates similar to Medicare -- about two-thirds higher than Medicaid. But many people fear that will give doctors even less reason to accept people on Medicaid.
In Michigan, the number of doctors who will see Medicaid patients has fallen from 88% in 1999 to 64% in 2005. Many of those doctors tightly cap how many they'll see or refuse to take on new Medicaid patients. At the same time, enrollment in the program in Michigan has risen more than 50% to nearly 1.6 million since 1999.
Paul Reinhart, the state's Medicaid director, says he doesn't believe difficulties finding specialists is a pervasive issue. But he acknowledges that patients can run into access problems. "That's a problem that we're working on and one that probably can only really be resolved with increased [fees]," he says. To safeguard against access problems, his agency requires the plans to have at least one primary-care physician for every 750 people in a given region. The program also checks a few times a year whether the specialists listed in the plans' networks are indeed available.
"At this point, I have to pay money out of my own pocket to take care of that [Medicaid] patient, and it's only going to get worse," says AppaRao Mukkamala, president of the Michigan State Medical Society and a radiologist in Flint, Mich. There, auto-industry layoffs have helped push one in five people onto Medicaid or into the ranks of the uninsured.
For every chest X-ray Dr. Mukkamala performs, for instance, Medicaid pays him $20. Commercial insurers such as Blue Cross pay about $33 and Medicare pays $30. But with technicians, film and other equipment, his costs are about $29 per X-ray, he estimates. Medicaid patients he sees at Hurley Medical Center in Flint make up 28% of his work there.
Like many states, Michigan hires private Medicaid HMOs to administer benefits. The state pays HMOs a monthly fee for each patient. The HMOs then pay doctors, usually amounts close to government-set payments. As in many states, the managed-care plans win Medicaid contracts based partly on how robust their networks of doctors and hospitals are.
The HMOs' directories of network providers in Michigan seem full, but phone calls to listed specialists in some places find big holes. The three HMOs which operate in the county around Benton Harbor -- Community Choice, Great Lakes Health Plan and Health Plan of Michigan -- post on their Web sites lists of local specialists participating in their network.
Of the 11 obstetrician-gynecologists that Community Choice lists for Berrien County, four doctors said they were listed in error, and another one no longer practices in the area. One took only Medicaid patients referred to her by doctors within her practice. Three others were only seeing new Medicaid patients at a nearby clinic, not in their offices. And two more were taking patients at the same clinic.
Many doctors on Health Plan of Michigan's list, which includes many of the same names, had similar restrictions. Great Lakes' Web site noted that none of the six on its ob-gyn list were accepting new patients.
[Fee Disparity]
All three HMOs' listed gastroenterologists -- another high-demand specialist area -- only saw Medicaid patients at an offsite clinic where appointment waits can be three to nine months.
The health plans say they encourage members and their referring doctors to call them if they have trouble getting an appointment with a specialist. "We can't just rely on what's in the directory -- it would be our obligation to help any member," says Pamela Morris, president of CareSource Management Group, which manages Community Choice's health plan. She adds that a wait of several months is "unacceptable." The company says that all of the doctors in its directory are indeed contracted with it. It says sometimes staff at medical practices make mistakes about what plans they accept.
Health Plan of Michigan's chief operating officer, Shery Cotton, says that in some places, it will pay doctors bonuses to encourage them to see ob-gyn patients. It also periodically checks in with primary doctors to see if their Medicaid patients are being refused by specialists. And it doesn't require plan members to use just network doctors.
But Ms. Cotton acknowledges that low reimbursements from the state sometimes make raising participation a struggle: "We literally get on the phone with doctors and beg, 'Will you see this patient?'"
Steve Matthews, a spokesman for AmeriChoice, the Medicaid arm of UnitedHealth Group Inc., which owns Great Lakes Health Plan, said that the plan's customer-service records don't show a doctor-access problem in Benton Harbor. He added that if a patient has difficulty, the company will help set up an appointment "anywhere in the state, regardless of whether they're in the network." Many primary-care doctors, however, say they don't have the time or resources to call the plans for all of the patients for whom they have trouble finding referrals.
Robert Ward III, a neurologist in nearby St. Joseph, says the only new Medicaid patients his practice now sees are those who were admitted to the local hospital first. Occasionally, he will see a patient referred by a doctor he knows. But all three of the local Medicaid HMOs have Dr. Ward listed as a network provider -- only Great Lakes Health Plan's Web site notes that he isn't accepting new patients. Dr. Ward says his office has pointed this out to the Medicaid plans.
When he started his practice in the early 1990s, Dr. Ward says he placed no limits and Medicaid patients flocked to his practice. Medicaid patients soon ballooned to 35% of his roster.
"It was a rookie mistake," says Dr. Ward, one of only two full-time neurologists in the tri-county area.
Commercial health plans such as Blue Cross pay him between $72 and $85 for a typical neurological exam. He receives about $31 from the Medicaid plans. Now, 12% of his patients are on Medicaid.
Southwestern Medical Clinic, a multispecialty group, sees some Medicaid patients in its offices across the county because of its involvement in Christian-based medical mission work. That group now accounts for some 20% of the clinic's patient mix. Yet the clinic limits many appointments to Medicaid patients who live in the same or surrounding ZIP codes of its various branches.
"We don't want people driving past their community provider to come see us," says Kenneth O'Neill, Southwestern's medical director. "Otherwise the model of everyone doing their fair share starts to fall apart."
Delays in getting treatment can have serious consequences. Jennifer Kinchen, 47, enrolled in Medicaid in late 2005, after Hurricane Katrina forced her to leave her home in Louisiana and move near family in Benton Harbor. Since late last year, she has suffered from tremors severe enough to cause her to drop her coffee mug or sometimes fall, liver problems and high levels of ammonia in her blood.
Her family doctor has searched and waited to get her an appointment with a neurologist or gastroenterologist. In the meantime, Ms. Kinchen has gone to the emergency room a few times because of dehydration and blacking out.
In Benton Harbor, more than 300 patients lost access to counseling services after the main provider of Medicaid mental-health services, Riverwood Center, stopped accepting payments from Medicaid HMOs. Riverwood says the reimbursements it was receiving from the Medicaid HMOs for outpatient sessions didn't cover their costs.
Payment delays and other administrative hassles compounded the crunch, says Riverwood's president, Allen Edlefson. The center lost $350,000 in 2003, the year before it decided to quit its Medicaid HMO contracts. "It was a painful decision, but we just couldn't make it work financially," he says.
The Medicaid HMOs helped slow costs by more tightly managing care, such as reducing hospital admissions and assuring that recipients are at least assigned a primary-care doctor. The state estimates HMOs have saved Medicaid more than $300 million annually in recent years.
Nestled along Lake Michigan's southeastern shore, Benton Harbor has been hard hit by job losses. Manufacturers have steadily cut or relocated elsewhere good-paying union jobs with health benefits. About a quarter of the community of 12,000, poor and predominantly black, are unemployed.
As the city's middle class dwindled, most doctors, along with the hospital, relocated in the late 1980s and early 1990s across the St. Joseph River to its much more affluent twin, St. Joseph, a picturesque lake-resort town. Most of those doctors are listed in HMO networks but many don't accept Medicaid patients in their offices. Instead, many spend an afternoon every one or two weeks seeing Medicaid patients at a clinic set up in a building that once housed Benton Harbor's hospital.
[Don Tynes]
The doctors say they prefer the arrangement because the clinic -- which is run by the St. Joseph hospital -- pays them a flat rate for the afternoon, instead of Medicaid fees for each service. They don't have to worry about the administrative hassle of filing claims or no-show patients -- a common problem since many Medicaid recipients don't have ready transportation. But for patients, this can mean waiting months for an appointment.
The specialist crunch means that more of the burden is falling on primary-care physicians such as Don Tynes. Dr. Tynes runs one of the few primary-care practices left in Benton Harbor. Three years ago, he left his job as a salaried physician in a local community health center to set up his own practice in a former dry-cleaning shop across from Benton Harbor high school.
"I don't want to pull any punches taking care of people," says Dr. Tynes. "I'm a spiritual man, not a businessman." In his waiting room, gospel movies play round the clock on a DVD player and patients can sign up for his weight-loss coaching.
On a recent day, 22 out of the 37 patients were on Medicaid, and another 12 had Medicare or other government-sponsored insurance. Only three had commercial health coverage. Dr. Tynes tries to make ends meet with a bare-bones staff. He has also cultivated a loyal patient base by offering specialty services such as sexual-dysfunction treatment and marriage counseling. Depending on how good business is, he tries to pay himself an after-tax salary of $500 to $750 a week to support his family of five children.
But three times so far this year, he's forgone his biweekly paycheck to keep the practice out of the red. Last year, he cut his office staff from seven to four people. "We [primary-care physicians] are the ones keeping this Medicaid system together, but we're the ones getting killed," he says.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com
Tags:
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Nursing Home Compare
Welcome to Nursing Home Compare. The primary purpose of this tool is to provide detailed information about the past performance of every Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing home in the country.
Tags:
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Overuse Of Medication In Care Homes
Older people with problem behaviour in care homes are often given psychotropic medication due to lack of other options.
This is the conclusion of Ms Amy Wood-Mitchell from the Northumberland Tyne & Wear NHS Trust who presented her findings at the PSIGE conference, that was held in July 2007, at the Annual Conference for Psychology Specialists Working with Older People (PSIGE) - part of The British Psychological Society - at the University of Nottingham.
Using a qualitative approach eight 'old-age' consultant psychiatrists were interviewed about the factors which influenced their decisions to prescribe medication.
The results showed many inconsistencies in prescribing, often unrelated to the patient, such as pressure to prescribe, type of setting and lack of access to other services. The findings may explain why use of drugs is increasing for this type of problem, despite guidelines suggesting the use of non-drug based approaches prior to medication.
This is the conclusion of Ms Amy Wood-Mitchell from the Northumberland Tyne & Wear NHS Trust who presented her findings at the PSIGE conference, that was held in July 2007, at the Annual Conference for Psychology Specialists Working with Older People (PSIGE) - part of The British Psychological Society - at the University of Nottingham.
Using a qualitative approach eight 'old-age' consultant psychiatrists were interviewed about the factors which influenced their decisions to prescribe medication.
The results showed many inconsistencies in prescribing, often unrelated to the patient, such as pressure to prescribe, type of setting and lack of access to other services. The findings may explain why use of drugs is increasing for this type of problem, despite guidelines suggesting the use of non-drug based approaches prior to medication.
Tags:
Simvastatin Linked To Reduced Incidence Of Dementia
Statins are not all equal when it comes to their potential to guard against dementia, according to a study published in the online open access journal BMC Medicine. Statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs used by those with heart disease. The new findings suggest that simvastatin is associated with a lower incidence of dementia and Parkinson's disease. Disagreement over whether statins could guard against these conditions has meant the benefits to dementia sufferers to date have been unclear.
Tags:
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Innovative Furniture Design For Elderly And Infirm
While younger people can easily get in and out of bed or sit on a couch, older people can have a much harder time of it, with conditions such as arthritis or rheumatism considerably limiting their movements. Czech and German partners, involved in the EUREKA E! 3210 SPECIFURN project, have developed a new line of furniture aimed at making life and leisure easier for the elderly and infirm. Their designs are suitable for use in old people's homes, public urban spaces, swimming pools and railway stations.
"There is a lot to consider when designing furniture for senior citizens," says SPECIFURN coordinator Josef Bartak of Form, in the Czech Republic. "We need to closely consider elderly people's special needs, particularly their reduced mobility, but also other differences compared to younger members of the population." The new designs were based on in-depth research and considerable accumulated experience among the partners.
"There is a lot to consider when designing furniture for senior citizens," says SPECIFURN coordinator Josef Bartak of Form, in the Czech Republic. "We need to closely consider elderly people's special needs, particularly their reduced mobility, but also other differences compared to younger members of the population." The new designs were based on in-depth research and considerable accumulated experience among the partners.
Connecting Tags;
Paraprofessional Institute Issues Report on Strategies for Expanding Community Based Care
The Health Care for Health Care Workers (HCHCW) Campaign of the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI)
is pleased to share with you recent findings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) Direct Service
Workforce Demonstration Grants focused on health care coverage in four states. Under subcontract with the
Lewin Group, PHI completed interviews and focus groups with the four state grantees (North Carolina, New
Mexico, Maine, and Washington) to determine the advantages, disadvantages, and policy implications of their
efforts. The attached report, Emerging Strategies for Providing Health Coverage to the Frontline Workforce in Long-Term Care,
details grantees’ experiences in offering or promoting health care coverage to direct-care workers and long-term
care employers. This report was prepared by PHI.
Purpose of the Grants:
In 2003 and 2004 CMS awarded grants to 10 states with the goal of developing innovative strategies to address
recruitment and retention of direct-care workers and help stabilize the workforce. CMS has put great emphasis on
making home and community based options viable for long-term care consumers. Six of the grantees, Indiana,
North Carolina, Virginia, Maine, New Mexico, Maine and Washington, developed projects to make health care
coverage more affordable and accessible to direct-care workers in their states.
Strategies:
Strategies in each state varied and included:
The key findings in this report illustrate that any effort to expand coverage to uninsured direct-care workers faces
substantial barriers that workers and their employers must take into account when securing affordable health
insurance:
In addition to understanding barriers to coverage, important policy implications rose out of this demonstration
project that speak to the need of broader research and policy changes to make health care coverage available and
accessible to this vital workforce. These areas include identifying ways to:
lessons learned to continue working with you in the future to make health insurance coverage available to direct-
care workers in Michigan.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss this report further, please contact me at (517) 372-8310 or
tbridges@paraprofessional.org.
is pleased to share with you recent findings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) Direct Service
Workforce Demonstration Grants focused on health care coverage in four states. Under subcontract with the
Lewin Group, PHI completed interviews and focus groups with the four state grantees (North Carolina, New
Mexico, Maine, and Washington) to determine the advantages, disadvantages, and policy implications of their
efforts. The attached report, Emerging Strategies for Providing Health Coverage to the Frontline Workforce in Long-Term Care,
details grantees’ experiences in offering or promoting health care coverage to direct-care workers and long-term
care employers. This report was prepared by PHI.
Purpose of the Grants:
In 2003 and 2004 CMS awarded grants to 10 states with the goal of developing innovative strategies to address
recruitment and retention of direct-care workers and help stabilize the workforce. CMS has put great emphasis on
making home and community based options viable for long-term care consumers. Six of the grantees, Indiana,
North Carolina, Virginia, Maine, New Mexico, Maine and Washington, developed projects to make health care
coverage more affordable and accessible to direct-care workers in their states.
Strategies:
Strategies in each state varied and included:
- Subsidizing employer-sponsored health insurance
- Establishing health reimbursement arrangements, similar to a health savings account, for direct-care workers
- Targeted outreach to small-long term care employers and large numbers of direct-care workers employed directly by long-term care consumers.
The key findings in this report illustrate that any effort to expand coverage to uninsured direct-care workers faces
substantial barriers that workers and their employers must take into account when securing affordable health
insurance:
- Part-time work status and instability of hours, particularly in home and community-based services
- Low wages and high out-of-pocket costs
- Limited Medicaid reimbursement to providers of long-term care services
- High cost of care exacerbated by high-risk groups and small risk pools common among long-term careemployers.
In addition to understanding barriers to coverage, important policy implications rose out of this demonstration
project that speak to the need of broader research and policy changes to make health care coverage available and
accessible to this vital workforce. These areas include identifying ways to:
- Build the cost of health care coverage into Medicaid reimbursement methodologies
- Design state-subsidized health insurance programs, like the Michigan First Health Care Plan, that will meet
- the needs of the direct-care workforce
- Conduct effective outreach to non-traditional workforces and small businesses.
lessons learned to continue working with you in the future to make health insurance coverage available to direct-
care workers in Michigan.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss this report further, please contact me at (517) 372-8310 or
tbridges@paraprofessional.org.
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
ACP Commends Proposed Changes To Payments For Physician Work At Nursing Facilities, USA
The American College of Physicians (ACP) commended the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on its recent decision to increase the work relative value units (RVUs) for codes used in the nursing home setting.
"These increases in value are a testament to the extraordinary level of work required of physicians that work in nursing facilities," said David C. Dale, MD, FACP, president of ACP said. "This increase in value should help to make work in the nursing home as attractive as work in other settings."
"ACP was pleased to work with the American Medical Directors Association (AMDA) in assisting in the presentation of these codes to the Relative Value Update Committee (RUC)," Dr. Dale continued. "The RUC recommended significant increases in the value of these services and CMS accepted those recommendations. AMDA did a commendable job in presenting this information and we were grateful to work with them on this issue."
"These increases in value are a testament to the extraordinary level of work required of physicians that work in nursing facilities," said David C. Dale, MD, FACP, president of ACP said. "This increase in value should help to make work in the nursing home as attractive as work in other settings."
"ACP was pleased to work with the American Medical Directors Association (AMDA) in assisting in the presentation of these codes to the Relative Value Update Committee (RUC)," Dr. Dale continued. "The RUC recommended significant increases in the value of these services and CMS accepted those recommendations. AMDA did a commendable job in presenting this information and we were grateful to work with them on this issue."
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Nursing Home Residents Not Getting Regular Eye Care
Two-thirds of nursing home residents in a new UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) study had no record of or reference to an eye examination in their medical charts, although more than half were visually impaired. In findings published in the July issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, UAB researchers examined 380 residents of 17 Birmingham-area nursing homes.
Fifty-seven percent of the residents were visually impaired, with visual acuity worse than 20/40 in the better eye. Older adults living in the community typically have a visual impairment rate between 10 and 20 percent. Three-fourths of the participants had abnormal binocular contrast sensitivity, or the ability to detect boundaries between objects and changes in brightness, which is important for mobility and reading.
Fifty-seven percent of the residents were visually impaired, with visual acuity worse than 20/40 in the better eye. Older adults living in the community typically have a visual impairment rate between 10 and 20 percent. Three-fourths of the participants had abnormal binocular contrast sensitivity, or the ability to detect boundaries between objects and changes in brightness, which is important for mobility and reading.
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Home Care Industry Will Encounter 'Care Gap' Soon
As baby boomers "begin encountering the frailties of old age, the nation will face a widening 'care gap' that experts fear will compromise the quality of home care and force people into nursing homes too soon," the Dallas Morning News reports. The U.S., which today has about one million home care aides, will need as many as one million additional workers by 2017 and as many as three million more by 2030, according to experts. The growth in demand will come from the age-65-and-over population doubling in the next 25 years, in addition to a preference for receiving care at home instead of in nursing homes, according to the Morning News.
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Saturday, July 7, 2007
Media Advisory: Home Care Workers To Tell Congress How Deficient Long-term Care Coverage Threatens The Well-being Of Seniors
Friday, July 6, 2007 : Legislation Would Help Fix Weaknesses in America’s Long-Term Care System Washington, DC-- On Tuesday, July 11, home care workers will urge the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to pass legislation establishing a national insurance program for adults who might become functionally disabled or currently have severe impairments and need affordable long-term care.The CLASS Act, formally called the Communities Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, is a critical step in addressing the long-term needs of the millions of Americans not prepared for the costs - especially as the need for home- and community-based services increase with the aging baby boomer generation.
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New Report Says Hitting The Medicare Doughnut Hole Can Be Deadly For Some Seniors, USA
In 2007, an estimated 7 million Medicare Prescription Drug Plan beneficiaries will hit the coverage gap, called the doughnut hole. Hitting the doughnut hole can have very serious health consequences for seniors. In fact, it can even potentially result in death.
Shockingly, a 2006 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine called, "Unintended Consequences of Caps on Medicare Drug Benefits," found that drug plans with a cap on drug coverage (as is the case with the doughnut hole in the Medicare Drug Plan) have an annual death rate that is 22% higher than plans that do not limit drug benefits.
Shockingly, a 2006 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine called, "Unintended Consequences of Caps on Medicare Drug Benefits," found that drug plans with a cap on drug coverage (as is the case with the doughnut hole in the Medicare Drug Plan) have an annual death rate that is 22% higher than plans that do not limit drug benefits.
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Friday, July 6, 2007
What Older Women Want' - New Website For Doctors And Patients Based On CMAJ Study Findings
A Canadian study of older women's health needs and concerns published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in July 2005, and reported widely in the media, has sparked a new website directed at both patients and health practitioners: http://www.wowhealth.ca
Known widely as 'WOW' or the 'What Older Women Want' study, conducted by Drs. Cara Tannenbaum, Nancy Mayo and Francine Ducharme, the study asked 5000 older women across Canada which of their health needs they felt were not being met or addressed adequately by their health practitioners.
Their answers surprised many in healthcare provision, since the key topics the women highlighted were not concerned so much with critical care concerns or disease treatment, but primary care and disease prevention.
Known widely as 'WOW' or the 'What Older Women Want' study, conducted by Drs. Cara Tannenbaum, Nancy Mayo and Francine Ducharme, the study asked 5000 older women across Canada which of their health needs they felt were not being met or addressed adequately by their health practitioners.
Their answers surprised many in healthcare provision, since the key topics the women highlighted were not concerned so much with critical care concerns or disease treatment, but primary care and disease prevention.
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New Tool Kit: Massachusetts Health Reform
Ed Howard and his team at the non-partisan Alliance for Health Reform here in Washington, have done another of their great jobs in putting together a resource for anyone interested in the Massachusetts health reform plan.
From their overview:
"Starting July 1, every adult in Massachusetts is required to have health coverage (except for 60,000 people exempted by the state). To help you understand the state's pace-setting near-universal coverage plan and its implications, the Alliance for Health Reform has compiled a toolkit with links to representative articles and documents from across the ideological spectrum."
You can download it from their site.
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Controlling Death: The False Promise of Advance Directives
Advance directives promise patients a say in their future care but actually have had little effect. Many experts blame problems with completion and implementation, but the advance directive concept itself may be fundamentally flawed. Advance directives simply presuppose more control over future care than is realistic. Medical crises cannot be predicted in detail, making most prior instructions difficult to adapt, irrelevant, or even misleading. Furthermore, many proxies either do not know patients' wishes or do not pursue those wishes effectively. Thus, unexpected problems arise often to defeat advance directives, as the case in this paper illustrates. Because advance directives offer only limited benefit, advance care planning should emphasize not the completion of directives but the emotional preparation of patients and families for future crises. The existentialist Albert Camus might suggest that physicians should warn patients and families that momentous, unforeseeable decisions lie ahead. Then, when the crisis hits, physicians should provide guidance; should help make decisions despite the inevitable uncertainties; should share responsibility for those decisions; and, above all, should courageously see patients and families through the fearsome experience of dying.
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Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Getting Old Is A Costly Business - Prescription Costs For Males Higher
ndependent research, involving over 3 million Italians, conducted by Henley Management College and the University of Milan has concluded that the prescription costs for men over the age of 65 is significantly higher than it is for women. The study is published in the July 4th issue of the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.
The primary objective of this study was to make the first step in the modelling of pharmaceutical demand in Italy to improve the governance of prescribing funds.
The research found that the mean annual prescription cost per individual was similar for males (196.13 euros) and females (195.12 euros). However after 65 years of age, the mean prescribing costs for males were significantly higher than females. On average, costs for a 75-year-old man would be 12 times the costs for a 25-34 year-old subject if male, 8 times if female. Subjects over 65 years of age (22% of total population) accounted for 56% of total prescribing costs.
The primary objective of this study was to make the first step in the modelling of pharmaceutical demand in Italy to improve the governance of prescribing funds.
The research found that the mean annual prescription cost per individual was similar for males (196.13 euros) and females (195.12 euros). However after 65 years of age, the mean prescribing costs for males were significantly higher than females. On average, costs for a 75-year-old man would be 12 times the costs for a 25-34 year-old subject if male, 8 times if female. Subjects over 65 years of age (22% of total population) accounted for 56% of total prescribing costs.
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Tuesday, July 3, 2007
FDA Clears 'Computerized Medication Box' For U.S. Market
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared for marketing the INRange Systems' Electronic Medication Management Assistant (EMMA), a programmable device that stores and dispenses prescription medication for patients' use in the home.
Essentially a computerized medication box, EMMA was designed to be used under the supervision of a licensed health care provider. EMMA can reduce drug identification and dosing errors, and allow health care professionals to monitor patient adherence to medication regimens in an outpatient setting. It may be especially useful for aging patients, as well as those with complex medication regimens such as patients with HIV.
"FDA's clearance of the INRange remote medication management system puts an important safety tool directly in the hands of patients and their health care providers," said Daniel Schultz, M.D., director of FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. "It will help take away some of the confusion patients can experience when taking prescription medications, and allow care providers to more closely monitor their patients' medications between office visits."
Essentially a computerized medication box, EMMA was designed to be used under the supervision of a licensed health care provider. EMMA can reduce drug identification and dosing errors, and allow health care professionals to monitor patient adherence to medication regimens in an outpatient setting. It may be especially useful for aging patients, as well as those with complex medication regimens such as patients with HIV.
"FDA's clearance of the INRange remote medication management system puts an important safety tool directly in the hands of patients and their health care providers," said Daniel Schultz, M.D., director of FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. "It will help take away some of the confusion patients can experience when taking prescription medications, and allow care providers to more closely monitor their patients' medications between office visits."
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Monday, July 2, 2007
Action Alert: Congress Continues To Consider Cuts To Homecare Programs, USA
Congress needs to hear loud support for homecare programs, particularly for the home oxygen benefit and for changes to competitive bidding. Medicare bills are percolating in Congress right now and cuts to homecare are being considered.
The Senate Finance Committee is moving forward on a bill that would expand as well as reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover more children. This bill would have a large price tag in the $40 to $50 billion range. That means that under the current pay-as-you-go rules, Congress will be looking for offsets (spending cuts elsewhere) or tax increases to pay for the SCHIP bill. Some targets could yield a lot of money - for instance reducing payments to the Medicare Advantage plans or increasing tobacco taxes. Cuts to home medical equipment would yield much smaller savings, but apparently HME cuts are on the table, according to CongressDaily. Earlier this week, Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.) discussed possible cuts with several other committee members - ranking member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).
The Senate Finance Committee is moving forward on a bill that would expand as well as reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover more children. This bill would have a large price tag in the $40 to $50 billion range. That means that under the current pay-as-you-go rules, Congress will be looking for offsets (spending cuts elsewhere) or tax increases to pay for the SCHIP bill. Some targets could yield a lot of money - for instance reducing payments to the Medicare Advantage plans or increasing tobacco taxes. Cuts to home medical equipment would yield much smaller savings, but apparently HME cuts are on the table, according to CongressDaily. Earlier this week, Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.) discussed possible cuts with several other committee members - ranking member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).
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Keeping Childless Seniors Out Of Nursing Homes
Older Americans without children have a much lower risk of being admitted to a nursing home if they live in a state that spends more on home- and community-based services (HCBS), according to an article published in the latest issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (Vol. 62B, No. 3).
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Manor Care to Be Bought by Carlyle for $6.3 Billion
July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Manor Care Inc., the operator of nursing homes and assisted-living centers, agreed to be acquired by the Carlyle Group for $6.3 billion.
Manor Care shareholders will receive $67 a share in cash, the Toledo, Ohio, company said today in a statement on PR Newswire. That's 20 percent higher than the closing price of $55.75 on April 10, before Manor Care said it would explore putting itself up for sale.
Owners of health-care facilities have become acquisition targets or gone private as medical costs have risen. Community Health Systems Inc. agreed in March to pay $5.1 billion for Triad Hospitals Inc. HCA Inc., the biggest U.S. hospital operator, went private in a $21.3 billion deal in November.
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Wall Street Journal Examines Nursing Home Care For Children With Disabilities
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday examined how thousands of children with disabilities live in nursing homes, even as "the cost to taxpayers, and the strain on families, is much lower" when the child lives at home. CMS estimates that about 4,000 children nationwide live in nursing homes, many of which are primarily for the elderly. Medicaid guarantees nursing home care for people with disabilities, but coverage for in-home care is controlled by state governments and often is insufficient. Moreover, "there aren't enough home care workers, nurses and therapists to serve these families," the Journal reports.
About 93,000 disabled people of all ages are on waiting lists for home- and community-care services. But when "home care is available, it typically costs taxpayers less" than nursing home care, the Journal reports. Home and community care cost about $26,000 per year, according to the University of Minnesota Research and Training Center on Community Living, whereas the state of Georgia spends about $81,000 per patient on nursing home care.
CDC has called for all disabled children to be out of "congregate settings," meaning facilities with four or more disabled persons, by 2010, and federal funding for in-home and community care has increased by nearly 300% since 1997. CMS spokesperson Mary Kahn said, "The Bush administration has been very supportive of home care." However, the Journal reports that the number of institutionalized children has remained steady in recent years.
About 93,000 disabled people of all ages are on waiting lists for home- and community-care services. But when "home care is available, it typically costs taxpayers less" than nursing home care, the Journal reports. Home and community care cost about $26,000 per year, according to the University of Minnesota Research and Training Center on Community Living, whereas the state of Georgia spends about $81,000 per patient on nursing home care.
CDC has called for all disabled children to be out of "congregate settings," meaning facilities with four or more disabled persons, by 2010, and federal funding for in-home and community care has increased by nearly 300% since 1997. CMS spokesperson Mary Kahn said, "The Bush administration has been very supportive of home care." However, the Journal reports that the number of institutionalized children has remained steady in recent years.
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