August, 2014

Don't let anyone tell you hospitals aren't spending money, even in CA

Kaiser Permanente, the 32-hospital California-based system that also operates its own health plan, reported a 25% increase in its net surplus during the second quarter of the year as it added new members and scaled back its capital spending. This certainly explains their politics and advocacy of the ACA law.

Nearly a third of hospital executives expect clinical information technology to have the biggest impact on the quality of care and patient outcomes – ahead of financial performance, clinical operations and patient engagement. Healthcare decision makers expect cost reductions as high as 15%. “Despite this optimism about the benefits, only 19 percent of those surveyed said their organizations are already delivering results based on their information management capabilities. Nearly 28 percent said they are currently implementing the capabilities, while 23 percent are in the planning stages. About 8 percent said they do not have a plan.”

"It's clear that at a crucial time for the industry — which is faced with declining reimbursement, consumer-driven care, a shift toward value and meaningful use penalties — information technology has become more of a problem than a solution. " Please say it ain't so: IT vendors charging exhortation rates for support, service and upgrades? Once they got ya they really got ya. EHRs may even be harming patients. Chuck Lauer, former publisher of Modern Healthcare speaks out.

Next year, U.S. healthcare providers will be subject to Medicare penalties if they do not meet up to 26 measures for value-based purchasing. As physicians wait to see if their payments will be docked or boosted based on how they rank, health policy researchers are continuing to raise questions about how the program works.

Medicare treats physicians as criminals — guilty until proven innocent.

Medicare regulatory codes by which physicians must abide is 130,000 pages long! (US Tax code is only 75,000).

Medicare warns patients on their billing statements to turn their physicians in for suspected fraud.

Figures never lie but liars know how to figure. That certainly holds true here. However based on studies like this the government's grasp on more tax revenue won't relent and the Medical Device Tax is here to stay.