Insurance companies often require patients to have medical procedures, devices, tests and even some medicines preapproved to ensure the insurers are willing to cover the costs. But that doesn’t guarantee they’ll end up paying. Some patients are getting stuck with unexpected bills after the medical service has been provided.
Insurance giant Cigna and San Francisco-based Dignity Health have failed to ink a 2020 contract, leaving nearly 17,000 patients in California and Nevada scrambling to find new health care providers. Meanwhile, Dignity faces financial and legal challenges while it strives to implement its merger with Catholic Health Initiatives, which created one of the nation’s largest Catholic hospital systems.
We checked again. The data has not changed.
If you’re told Medicare’s home health benefits have changed, don’t believe it: Coverage rules haven’t been altered and people are still entitled to the same types of services. All that has changed is how Medicare pays agencies.
Doctors and other clinicians say they’re enduring moral injury because the business of health care interferes with patient care.
Medicare has changed how it pays for services. In response, agencies across the country are firing therapists, limiting physical, occupational and speech therapy, and terminating services for some longtime, severely ill patients.
Medicare cut payments for 786 hospitals because of high infection and complication rates. They included a third of the hospitals proclaimed as the nation’s best in one prominent ranking.
A study ordered by the Food and Drug Administration failed to prove that Makena, the only drug approved to prevent premature birth, is effective. While a panel of experts has recommended withdrawing the drug’s approval, many doctors are wary.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has earmarked nearly $600 million in his 2020-21 state budget plan to provide intensive care management to high-needs, high-risk patients around the state. The programs are similar to an initiative in Camden, New Jersey, that was called into question by a recent study finding hospital readmissions dropped, but at only about the same rate as patients who didn’t receive the same kind of intensive services.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg uses health care as a key message in his Democratic presidential primary run.
