Category Archives: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

DOJ breaks up alleged genetic testing fraud scheme estimated at $2.1 billion

Posted on by • Posted in Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Compliance Issues, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dept of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Fraud, Genetic Testing, Kickbacks, Medicare, Medicare Fraud, Physician, Rev Cycle Management, Telemedicine • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/doj-breaks-alleged-genetic-testing-fraud-scheme-estimated-21-billion?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkdNMU56WmxabVl3TWpRMSIsInQiOiI0dlhaYUJpT2xBU0FqeDNmWkRlZHVZYnRsZ2xBK3pxMmN6RG5kS3Q1UWgrWFYyNllIK2lLZEYzclRDWUYyTFwvOGdhUzRVSnlscG5MQjBtY0NwT2d1TjZHdXJYRUlYRGszVEhrQmY5b0xhRDlFTWNTNUEwWnVvWGUwZXE3ME9kdGgifQ%3D%3D

The defendants ordered unnecessary tests that were reimbursed by Medicare, with laboratories sharing the profit, DOJ says.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged 35 people with unlawfully charging Medicare $2.1 billion in what it said is one of the largest healthcare fraud schemes in history.

The 35 alleged offenders were charged in five separate federal districts, and were linked to dozens of telemedicine firms and laboratories focused on genetic testing for cancer. The people charged, including nine doctors and one other medical professional, cumulatively billed Medicare billions for cancer genetic tests, the DOJ said in a press release.

The charges were a culmination of coordinated law enforcement activities over the past month that were led by the Criminal Division’s Health Care Fraud Unit, resulting in charges against more than 380 individuals who allegedly billed federal healthcare programs for more than $3 billion, and allegedly prescribed and dispensed approximately 50 million controlled substance pills in Houston, across Texas, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, the Northeast, Florida and Georgia, and the Midwest.

These include charges against 105 defendants for opioid-related offenses, and charges against 178 medical professionals.

The investigation targeted an alleged scheme involving the payment of illegal kickbacks and bribes by CGx laboratories in exchange for the referral of Medicare beneficiaries by medical professionals working with fraudulent telemedicine companies for expensive, and medically unnecessary, cancer genetic tests.

According to the DOJ, the targets of the scheme were primarily seniors, who were approached at health fairs, at their homes during door-to-door visits, or through telemarketing calls. The “recruiters,” as they were called, would approach seniors about supposedly free cancer screenings or generic cheek swab tests, and the recruiters would then obtain the seniors’ Medicare information for the purposes of fraudulent billing or identify theft.

The recruiter would then get a doctor to sign off on a genetic so a lab would process it, and then pay a kickback in exchange for ordering the test. The lab would process the test and bill Medicare, and once it was reimbursed, would share the proceeds with the recruiter, according to the charges.

Often, the test results were not provided to the beneficiaries, or were worthless to their actual doctors. Some of the defendants allegedly controlled a telemarketing network that lured hundreds of thousands of elderly and/or disabled patients into a criminal scheme that affected victims across the U.S.

The defendants allegedly paid doctors to prescribe CGx testing, either without any patient interaction or with only a brief phone conversation with patients they had never met or seen.

WHAT’S THE IMPACT

In addition to the DOJ charges, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Center for Program Integrity said it took adverse administrative action against cancer genetic testing companies and medical professionals who submitted more than $1.7 billion in claims to the Medicare program.

The DOJ Criminal Division, along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and the FBI, spearheaded the investigation.

The DOJ calls the scheme one of the largest it has ever handled.

THE LARGER TREND

Since its inception in March 2007, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, which maintains 15 strike forces operating in 24 districts, has charged nearly 4,000 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for more than $16 billion.

In addition, CMS, working in conjunction with the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.

The newest Medicare fraud scheme is the second to be uncovered in the last month. Earlier in September, a telemedicine CEO pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and pay and receive healthcare kickbacks and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering in a scheme estimated at $424 million.

ON THE RECORD

“Unfortunately, audacious schemes such as those alleged in the indictments are pervasive and exploit the promise of new medical technologies such as genetic testing and telemedicine for financial gain, not patient care,” said Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Gary L. Cantrell of HHS-OIG. “Instead of receiving quality care, Medicare beneficiaries may be victimized in the form of scare tactics, identity theft, and in some cases, left to pay out of pocket.  We will continue working with our law enforcement partners to investigate those who steal from federal healthcare programs and protect the millions of Americans who rely on them.”

“Healthcare fraud and related illegal kickbacks and bribes impact the entire nation,” said Assistant Director Terry Wade of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “Fraudulently using genetic testing laboratories for unnecessary tests erodes the confidence of patients and costs taxpayers millions of dollars. These investigations revealed some medical professionals placing their greed before the needs of the patients and communities they serve. Today’s law enforcement actions reinforce that the FBI, along with its partners, will continue to pursue and stop this type of illegal activity.”

 

Hospitals, insurers object to rule posting their negotiated rates

Posted on by • Posted in American Hospital Association (AHA), Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare 340B Drug Discount Program, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pre-Authorization, Price Transparency, Transparency • Leave a comment

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CMS is proposing that hospitals make public their payer-specific negotiated charges for a limited set of “shoppable” services.

Hospitals and insurers have made clear their opposition to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed rule requiring the disclosure of their privately negotiated contract rates.

CMS is proposing that hospitals make public their payer-specific negotiated charges for a limited set of “shoppable” services or face civil monetary penalties, in a rule to go into effect on January 1, 2020. Comments were due by September 27.

Under the rule, hospitals would display payer-specific negotiated charges for at least 300 shoppable services, including 70 selected by CMS and 230 by the provider.

The American Hospital Association called it the wrong approach, even though it said it supported ensuring patients have the information they need, including knowing what their expected out-of-pocket costs would be. However, the AHA said, “Instead of helping patients estimate their out-of-pocket obligations, it would introduce confusion and fuel anticompetitive behavior among commercial health insurers in an already highly-concentrated insurance industry, seriously limiting the choices available to patients.”

America’s Essential Hospitals said, “We are particularly concerned that the agency’s proposals regarding the public posting of charges, in particular the posting of negotiated rates, offer little benefit to the consumer, add substantial burden to hospitals, and pose harm to competition, potentially driving up prices.”

America’s Health Insurance plans said that forcing disclosure of privately and competitively negotiated rates will not provide consumers with information that is actionable or helpful. I

“Instead,”AHIP said, “it will hamper competitive negotiations and push healthcare prices and premiums higher for patients, consumers, businesses and taxpayers. This proposed rule also has significant implications for, and is interconnected with, other proposed rules regarding interoperability of health care data. We are concerned that unknown entities will have open access to the data, with few restrictions on how they may use it.”

WHY THIS MATTERS

CMS released the proposals on July 29 in the 2020 hospital outpatient prospective payment and ambulatory surgical center payment rule.

The rule also has three additional proposed policies that run afoul of the law, the AHA said.

Specifically, the AHA opposes completion of the phase-in of payment reductions for the hospital outpatient clinic visit in excepted off-campus provider-based departments to the “physician fee schedule equivalent” rate of 40% of the outpatient prospective payment system rate.

The AHA said the proposal “exceeds the Administration’s legal authority and should be abandoned.”

The AHA has already won a case in court on the government’s site neutral payment policy.

“On the clinic visit policy, we remind CMS that the agency was recently found by the courts to have exceeded its statutory authority when it cut the payment rate for clinic services at excepted off-campus provider-based departments,” the AHA said.

Hospitals also object to continuing the current policy that pays for separately payable drugs acquired through the 340B drug savings program at the rate of average sales price minus 22.5%.

And the AHA objects to the implementation of a prior authorization process for five categories of outpatient department services.

THE LARGER TREND

On September 17, a federal judge ruled in favor of the AHA and hospital organizations, saying CMS exceeded its statutory authority when it reduced payments for hospital outpatient services provided in off-campus provider-based departments that were grandfathered under the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015.

The AHA, joined by the Association of American Medical Colleges and several member hospitals, had filed the lawsuit in December.

ON THE RECORD

America’s Essential Hospitals said, “These cuts deter hospitals from expanding access in communities with the most need for healthcare services and run counter to CMS’ goal of integrated, coordinated healthcare.

“Taken together, these proposals would have a chilling effect on beneficiary access to care while also increasing regulatory burden,” the AHA said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Judge strikes down Trump administration’s site-neutral payments rule

Posted on by • Posted in American Hospital Association (AHA), Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), District Court, District Court of Appeals, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital Industry, Medicare, Medicare Part B, Medicare Rate Setting, Rev Cycle Management • Leave a comment

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals-health-systems/judge-strikes-down-trump-administration-s-site-neutral-payments-rule?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1dJNE5tUTFZV0k1TVdRNCIsInQiOiJMakFtS1IzZmxaRDlQNUtjdFdMUHVYUFdBd1wvXC9EZFR3ekhHU3ZsYVNib2t3bTlEb0Z2bklLZndEZXFOTjZ1RVZ0bURYMXI5dGFNcW92SXFYV25HTVh4d01tNEY4YkVCUnBMamhpbllXSytVTW5ybGJ1OTh0UjJmVDRmSWJ6c1wveCJ9&mrkid=959610

Gavel court room lawsuit judge

In a huge win for hospitals, a federal judge has tossed the Trump administration’s rule instituting site-neutral payments.

District of Columbia Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled Tuesday that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) overstepped its authority when it finalized a plan to extend a site-neutral payment policy to clinic visits with the goal of paying the same in Medicare for evaluation and management services at physician offices and hospitals.

Hospital groups immediately rebelled against the plan. Within hours of the rule’s finalization in November, the American Hospital Association (AHA) vowed to challenge the change, as it would cut payment rates to hospitals significantly. AHA and the Association of American Medical Colleges formally did so about a month later.

CMS argues that the payment change would save Medicare beneficiaries $150 million per year, lowering average copays from $23 to $9. Those savings, however, are coupled with significant payment cuts to hospitals; the AHA estimated losses of $380 million in 2019 and $760 million in 2020.

In her order, Collyer said that the rule did not meet the standard of a method to control unneeded hospital use, as CMS argued in court filings.

“CMS believes it is paying millions of taxpayer dollars for patient services in hospital outpatient departments that could be provided at less expense in physician offices. CMS may be correct,” the judge wrote. “But CMS was not authorized to ignore the statutory process for setting payment rates in the Outpatient Prospective Payment System and to lower payments only for certain services performed by certain providers.”

Collyner did not require CMS to pay funds lost under policy change so far this year and instead requested a status report by Oct.1 from both parties to determine whether additional briefings are required to decide a suitable resolution.

In a statement, the AHA and AAMC praised the judge’s decision.

“The ruling, which will allow hospitals to maintain access to important services for patients and communities, affirmed that the cuts directly undercut the clear intent of Congress to protect hospital outpatient departments because of the many real and crucial differences between them and other sites of care,” the hospital groups said. “Now that the court has ruled, it is up to the agency to put forth remedies for impacted hospitals and the patients they serve.”

 

 

 

Medicare Advantage is booming but not producing savings, report finds

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Policy, Medicare, Medicare ACO, Medicare Advantage, Outcomes, Risk Adjustment Model • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/medicare-advantage-is-booming-but-not-producing-savings-report-finds/561187/

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Dive Brief:

  • Medicare Advantage is not producing any savings but spends between 2% and 5.5% more than traditional Medicare, a report in Health Affairs finds.
  • On the other hand, the report found Medicare’s accountable care organizations are reducing costs as compared to traditional Medicare. The Medicare Shared Savings Program, which includes accountable care organizations, saved about 1% to 2% in 2016. 
  • The authors suggest a number of changes for policymakers to consider if they want to improve competition and address flaws among the two programs.

Dive Insight:

As the popularity of programs such as Medicare Advantage grows, it’s important to understand the spending ramifications and whether the program is yielding any savings for taxpayers.

More and more seniors are choosing coverage options outside of traditional Medicare. Together, Medicare Advantage and the Medicare Shared Savings Program cover about half of all Medicare beneficiaries. In a six-year period, Medicare Advantage alone grew by 57% and as of 2018 covered nearly 20 million seniors.

Medicare Advantage allows private insurers to contract with the federal government to care for eligible Medicare beneficiaries. Private plans receive a fixed payment — typically a per member, per month allotment — to coordinate care for beneficiaries who choose MA plans. 

It’s these “predictable” payments that allow MA plans to invest in unconventional coverage options such as meal delivery and transportation to appointments, the authors said.

But despite the program’s popularity, it’s not yielding the savings that was originally expected.

“When a beneficiary joins MA, Medicare spends more, on average, than it would have if the patient had remained in traditional Medicare. We find the opposite in the MSSP: When a patient joins the Medicare ACO program, Medicare costs fall,” according to Health Affairs.

There are also differences between the two programs that should be fixed, the authors said. 

The MSSP is only punitive, which is not true for the star-rating program for MA. One way to achieve a more equitable ratings system is to “radically” reduce the number of quality measures, which have become a burden for physicians, the authors said.

“We propose limiting quality measurement to five measures that are outcome oriented: hospital and ER use, patient satisfaction, and diabetes A1c and blood pressure control.”

It’s also important to find a risk adjustment model that can be used for both MA and MSSP populations, the authors said.

CMS has committed itself to reducing the amount of burden on payers and providers, and paring down quality ratings overhead is a key part of that. The agency’s removed a number of measures across its reporting programs in 2018 as part of its “Meaningful Measures” initiative, and is currently looking at others in MSSP, MA and the Merit-based Incentive Payment System.

 

 

 

Trade Secrets Challenge Could Trip Up Trump Hospital Prices Plan

Posted on by • Posted in Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), District Court, District Court of Appeals, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Price Transparency, Proprietary • Leave a comment

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/trade-secrets-challenge-could-trip-up-trump-hospital-prices-plan

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A legal fight is looming over a Trump administration proposal that would require hospitals to list their standard prices for medical services and their negotiated rates with insurance companies—prices some believe are proprietary.

Hospital and insurance groups are likely to sue if the administration moves forward with a final rule, and the litigation could raise thorny legal questions about a company’s right to be competitive and a patient’s right to make informed health-care choices.

One way hospitals and insurance groups may try to fight the rule is by claiming their negotiated prices are trade secrets, health attorneys say.

“We’ve been looking in our research group at whether health-care prices can be trade secrets, and the law is very unsettled on this issue,” said Jaime King, associate dean and professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued the proposed rule July 29 as part of a Trump administration push to make health-care costs more transparent.

It would require hospitals to list their standard prices and what individual insurers have agreed to pay for 70 “shoppable” medical services—like psychotherapy, blood tests, MRIs and ultrasounds—that can be scheduled in advance.

The government’s goal is to give consumers the information they need to compare what hospitals charge for similar services and to help them understand their potential financial liability for services they obtain at the hospital. Hospitals that fail to comply would be fined.

Listing the negotiated price an insurance company will pay on a patient’s behalf will show consumers how effective different health insurers are at negotiating lower out-of-pocket costs, attorneys say.

“We believe that this, in turn, will enable health-care consumers to make more informed decisions, increase market competition, and ultimately drive down the cost of health-care services, making them more affordable for all patients,” the CMS said in its proposal.

Legal Authority Questioned

The American Hospital Association was quick to object, contending in a prepared statement that the plan “exceeds the administration’s legal authority.” If the proposal is finalized, the trade group said it would look at its legal options.

“I think it’s reasonable for hospital groups to be looking at potential challenges if the rule is finalized as proposed,” said Philo Hall, senior counsel in Epstein, Becker and Green LLP’s health-care and life sciences practice.

The Affordable Care Act amended the Public Health Service Act by requiring hospitals to make public their “standard prices” for items and services. Attorneys say the CMS is now interpreting standard prices to also include the privately negotiated rates for each individual insurer.

But neither Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, nor hospital groups have ever considered the standard prices provision in the ACA to include commercial and financial information that is treated as confidential in a highly competitive industry, said Hall. Hall served as counsel to the George W. Bush administration’s HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt and worked closely in that role with Alex Azar, the current HHS chief.

“The concern that the government is overstepping is not frivolous,” said Michael Adelberg, a former senior CMS official who now leads the health-care strategy practice of the Faegre, Baker, Daniels Consulting.

“I don’t know if you can say to two entities ‘You can engage in a contract in a competitive market, but the most important terms of that contract are public,’” he said. “I don’t know if you can do that.”

In a statement, America’s Health Insurance Plans said the CMS proposal would make it harder for insurance companies to bargain for lower rates. The group said even the Federal Trade Commission agrees that making hospitals disclose their privately negotiated rates would create a floor—not a ceiling—for what hospitals would be willing to accept.

When the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology indicated in a proposal that it was considering adding network discounts and pricing data to the definition of electronic health information, UnitedHealth Group told the agency the details of the negotiated rates and the overall cost of its networks is a trade secret.

“Although federal courts have upheld regulations compelling the disclosure of Medicare cost report information, there is a significant difference between government payment information held by the government and the internal, proprietary information that the proposed regulation would compel UHC to disclose,” the insurance company said in comments in June.

CMS Could Prevail

The CMS proposal is similar to an HHS rule that would have required pharmaceutical companies to disclose the list price of their drugs in TV advertisements. A federal district court judge in July said the rule exceeded the administration’s regulatory authority and blocked it from taking effect.

In the drug pricing rule, the agency pointed to two provisions in the Social Security Act that tell the HHS secretary to make rules necessary for the “efficient administration of the Medicare and Medicaid program” as the source of authority.

But the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said there’s nothing in the law’s text, structure, or context to indicate Congress intended to give the HHS the power to issue a rule that forces drugmakers to disclose their list prices.

Attorneys say the agency’s authority to issue the hospital pricing rule is more explicit in the ACA.

“In this case, we have a different statutory provision that delegates the agency with a more specific task,” a former HHS attorney, who asked not to be identified, said in a conversation with Bloomberg Law.

“We’re not talking about a general statute concerning the efficient administration of the Medicare program to drug companies,” the former HHS attorney said. “We’re talking about an explicit statutory provision that directs the agency to require federally funded hospitals to disclose their ‘standard charges.’”

On that, the former HHS attorney said, the CMS could prevail. But it depends on how the agency defines “standard charges.” The agency could ultimately decide not to include negotiated rates after it considers the public comments.

In a statement, the CMS said its proposal is consistent with the ACA and responsive to patients and their advocates who say knowledge of negotiated rates is necessary for individuals to be able to determine their out-of-pocket costs for hospital services.

“All Americans have the right to know the price of their health care up front,” an agency spokesperson said. “Health-care prices shouldn’t be a mystery and consumers will be able to shop for health care just like they do for everything else they buy.”

 

 

 

Trump Shift, Backed by States, Fuels Fear of Too Few Medicaid Docs

Posted on by • Posted in Access & Quality of Healthcare, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Policy, Medicaid, Physician, Physician Compensation • Leave a comment

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/08/07/trump-shift-backed-by-states-fuels-fear-of-too-few-medicaid-docs?omnicid=CFC1662263&mid=henrykotula@yahoo.com

Stateline Aug7

Dr. Barbara Ricks is a pediatrician in Greenville, Mississippi, whose patients are nearly all on Medicaid. The Trump administration proposed eliminating an Obama-era rule that aims to ensure that patients can find a doctor who accepts Medicaid.
Rogelio V. Solis/The Associated Press

The Trump administration wants to drop an Obama-era rule designed to ensure that there are enough doctors to care for Medicaid patients.

State health officials say the rule, which requires states to monitor whether Medicaid reimbursement rates are high enough to keep doctors in the program, forces them to spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data with little benefit. Health care advocates, though, fear that dropping the regulation would enable states to set those payments at a level that would cause some of the 72 million Americans who rely on Medicaid to scramble for health care. Research shows that when reimbursement rates drop, fewer providers agree to accept low-income Medicaid patients.

Although the Medicaid Access Rule, adopted in 2016, pertains to Medicaid fee-for-service plans, the Trump administration also is seeking to relax requirements on how states determine whether Medicaid managed care organizations have enough providers.

If reimbursement rates are too low, there’s a risk that health care providers would see fewer Medicaid patients or even refuse to treat Medicaid enrollees altogether. That, in turn, could lead to longer wait times to see providers still participating in Medicaid or force patients to travel longer distances to reach providers remaining in the program.

Medicaid, the government health plan for low-income U.S. residents, covers 1 in 5 citizens. It is jointly administered and financed by the federal government and the states.

The rule, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said, “excessively constrains state freedom to administer the program in the manner that is best for the state and Medicaid beneficiaries in the state.”

According to Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, scrapping it would eliminate a bureaucratic headache for states that, in the end, hasn’t improved patients’ access to providers.

“Nobody is moving the goal of improved access,” Salo said.

Some health care advocates disagree, pointing out that the rule hasn’t been in place very long and that getting rid of it fits the Trump administration’s overall mission of giving states more freedom in operating Medicaid.

“The Trump administration’s approach to Medicaid has been state flexibility, giving states a lot more discretion to do what they want without a lot of attention to what beneficiaries need,” said Abbi Coursolle, a senior attorney with the National Health Law Program, a group based in Washington, D.C., that works to protect access to health care for low-income populations.

CMS last year called for a significant watering down of the Obama rule. Last month, the agency proposed to scrap it altogether. The comment period on elimination of the rule runs through next month, after which CMS will announce its decision.

The initial proposal to weaken the rule generated plenty of opposition. Among those objecting were hospital and physician organizations, groups that advocate for health care access for all, and organizations created to support those living with certain diseases and to raise funds for research into those conditions.

Among the latter was the Epilepsy Foundation, which warned in its public comment that weakening the rule would deprive CMS of information it needed to monitor and enforce Medicaid beneficiaries’ access to care. State reimbursement rates, the foundation said, are crucial to ensuring enough willing providers are available to treat Medicaid beneficiaries.

Shawn Martin, senior vice president of the Academy of Family Physicians, said scrapping the rule would make states more likely to set reimbursement rates too low, prompting practitioners to stop taking Medicaid patients or cut back. “A low reimbursement would affect how many beneficiaries providers are willing to see.”

Just as adamant on the other side, however, are many states that complain that the Obama rule is cumbersome and ineffective at ensuring access for Medicaid beneficiaries.

At the Maryland Department of Health, Tricia Roddy, a research director, said the rule doesn’t do much to help gauge the fees’ effects on access to care.

Similarly, at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, Marc Williams, a spokesman, said his state uses other strategies to ensure Medicaid beneficiaries’ access to the health services they need.

According to Salo of the Medicaid directors group, states of both political stripes, red and blue, are delighted that the Trump administration is moving to abolish the rule.

“It was creating many bureaucratic burdens without accomplishing anything concrete,” Salo said. The rule, he said, “is insanely micro-managed and overly bureaucratic.”

The 1965 law establishing Medicaid has been amended through the years to ensure that enough doctors, nurses and other providers are available to serve beneficiaries. Congress in 1989 passed an amendment making clear states’ obligation to pay providers enough to ensure Medicaid enrollees have access to care.

Medicaid pays doctors about three-fourths as much as Medicare, the government program for senior citizens, according to a 2017 analysis by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. And Medicare pays much less than private insurers.

When Medicaid and Medicare payments, or reimbursement rates, go down, research shows that patients make fewer doctor’s visits and more trips to the emergency room.

According to a 2017 Kaiser Family Foundation report, only about 70% of office-based physicians accept new Medicaid patients. The results vary from 39% in New Jersey to 97% in Nebraska. By comparison, the study found, 85% of doctors accept new patients with private insurance.

The 2016 rule required states to tell the agency every three years how providers from various geographic regions and specialties were participating in Medicaid, and how reimbursement rates were affecting that participation.

 

 

 

 

Are Trump’s Top Medicaid Regulators Ignoring Major Problems? Insurance Giant’s Tense Meeting With a Senator Adds to Growing Concern

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Policy, Medicaid, Medicaid Managed Care • Leave a comment

https://www.propublica.org/article/centene-bob-casey-are-trump-top-medicaid-regulators-ignoring-major-problems?utm_source=pardot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter

The ranking member of the Senate health committee has complained for months about the Trump administration’s failure to look into Medicaid contractors that have reaped big profits while sometimes failing to provide crucial patient services.

So last week, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., called in the top boss of Centene, the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care company. He wanted to question the company about reports that its Texas subsidiary denied life-sustaining care to sick and disabled children — in one case, leaving a baby in foster care to suffer a catastrophic brain injury.

The meeting with longtime Centene CEO Michael Neidorff did not go well, according to Casey.

“I thought they would try to persuade me that they were going to do better, but they didn’t seem interested in that at all,” Casey told ProPublica and The Dallas Morning News in an interview. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Casey said the Centene official denied providing inadequate care and cast blame for failures on foster parents and nurses.

Centene declined to make Neidorff available for an interview and emailed a brief statement in response to questions about the meeting with Casey.

“Centene and its subsidiaries care deeply about each and every member we serve,” the email read. “We work tirelessly to ensure we provide the appropriate level of care for our members.”

Under Neidorff, Centene has grown from a tiny health network in the Midwest into a $60-billion-a-year health care empire, backed almost entirely with taxpayer money. The company cares for more than 8.5 million Medicaid patients.

The company came under criticism last year after an eight-part investigation published in the Morning News examined whether Centene and other Medicaid managed care companies were skimping on care to bolster profits. The series raised questions about Centene’s Texas subsidiary, Superior HealthPlan, and its handling of the case of D’ashon Morris, a Texas toddler who was born with severe defects and was living in a foster home.

The series, titled “Pain & Profit,” reported that D’ashon was denied 24/7 nursing care and suffered brain damage after a medical incident that occurred while he did not have his nurse around. (Read the full story here.)

The Morning News reported that state health officials had found the Centene subsidiary in violation of state and federal Medicaid rules and recommended the company face steep fines for what happened to the child. But top Texas health officials never assessed those fines, the Morning News reported.

D’ashon’s adoptive mother sued the Centene subsidiary in Texas state court. That case is tied up in the Texas appeals court, where the Centene subsidiary has argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because D’ashon and his mother are stifling the company’s right to free speech.

During hearings in the state Capitol, Superior representatives denied that the company’s refusal to provide 24/7 nursing was improper.

After his meeting with the Centene official, Casey sent a strongly worded letter to Seema Verma, a former health consultant appointed by President Donald Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In the letter, Casey called Centene’s response to questions about D’ashon’s case “callous.”

He also asked Medicaid officials to dig further into Centene’s business practices and to provide documentation on any response to the Morning News investigation.

“It’s another indication that the regulatory approach here by the administration is, at best, suspect,” Casey said.

A CMS spokesman said that Texas officials have shared with the agency an “action plan they intended to take to address the concerns raised,” adding that CMS is in regular communication to ensure the state improves.

“CMS has received Sen. Casey’s letter and will respond to his office directly,” spokesman Brian Leshak said in an email.

Casey’s position as the top Democrat on two Senate panels overseeing federal health programs gives him the standing to raise questions about the Medicaid managed care system.

It’s not unusual for company officials facing a federal audit or investigation to meet with members of Congress to address concerns, but it is unusual for such meetings to spill into public view.

Casey said he sent the letter to CMS because of what he called Centene’s “cold and clinical” defense of what happened in D’ashon’s case. He said it gave him concern about how the company cares for other patients — and what, if anything, regulators are doing when things go wrong.

Last month, more than a year after the Morning News story was published, Centene officials provided Casey’s office with a one-page rebuttal titled: “The Dallas Morning News got it wrong.”

The company’s explanations include that D’ashon’s foster mother was a trained nurse. But, as the Morning News reported, she was on an approved vacation at the time of D’ashon’s injury, and he had been placed in a different foster home.

The company also said D’ashon’s foster mother should have restrained the baby, but the Morning News previously reported that Texas foster care officials confirmed restraints would have required a doctor’s order, which she did not have.

“It was all blame shifting and pointing to other factors,” Casey said of Centene’s letter.

Casey said the meeting left him wondering why federal regulators weren’t doing more.

“It might even be worse than asleep at the wheel,” he said of CMS under Verma’s watch.

“They may be awake at the wheel but choosing consciously to say, ‘We’re going the other direction.’”

Without commenting on specific cases, the CMS spokesman said the agency routinely monitors states and intervenes when necessary.

Problems with this privatized Medicaid model have grabbed headlines in other states, too. And advocates in those states said they haven’t heard much from CMS, which they say is a shift from the Obama administration.

In Iowa, for instance, The Des Moines Register reported failures to provide care and chronicled patients who had been caught in that state’s broken medical appeals system.

Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor, wrote to state officials in June that two large managed care companies had “significantly harmed” two paraplegic patients by refusing to provide services they needed.

Mary Nelle Trefz, of Iowa’s Child and Family Policy Center, said she’s been shocked to hear nothing about that from CMS.

“I don’t feel, or can’t observe, or point to anything, where CMS has stepped in to provide that oversight and accountability,” she said.

In March, California’s state auditor found that millions of children in that state’s privatized Medicaid system weren’t being provided services that taxpayers had paid for. Auditor Elaine Howle blamed California health officials’ “deficient oversight of the managed care plans.”

Andy Schneider, a researcher at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, and a former top adviser to CMS under the Obama administration, said these episodes come at an inconvenient time for the Trump administration, which is focused on reducing regulation and creating additional eligibility hurdles like work requirements.

CMS has taken a hands-off approach compared with the previous administration, he said.

“These are reports coming from reputable media sources,” he said. “They’re very concerning, they have to do with the operation of the program, they suggest that something is wrong.”

Hospital association: Wage index rule positive, but uncompensated care needs work

Posted on by • Posted in Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare, Medicare Wage Index, Uncompensated Care • Leave a comment

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/health-pulse/hospital-association-wage-index-rule-positive-uncompensated-care-needs-work?utm_source=health-pulse-tuesday&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20190805&utm_content=hero-readmore

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Friday unveiled its final rule on Medicare payment policies for hospitals under the inpatient prospective payment system for fiscal 2020. Though the Greater New York Hospital Association sees modifications to the agency’s proposal to address area wage index disparities as a boon, it’s not pleased with the outcome when it comes to uncompensated care.

“On a positive note, CMS modified its proposal to address wage index disparities between low and high wage index areas and will apply a uniform national budget neutrality factor to all hospitals instead of cutting only high wage area hospitals,” wrote Kenneth Raske, president and CEO of the association, in a letter to members.

The area wage index applies to the reimbursement of hospitals and raises or lowers Medicare payments to account for geographic differences in labor costs.

The final rule is designed to increase the wage index for hospitals with a value below the 25th percentile. Specifically, it will increase those hospitals’ wage indexes by half the difference between the otherwise applicable value for a hospital and the 25th percentile value across all hospitals. And there will be a 5% cap on any decrease in a hospital’s wage index from its final wage index for fiscal 2019 to mitigate significant decreases.

CMS’ previous proposal would have targeted only high wage index hospitals—such as those in New York—to address disparities. The modified provision will cost New York hospitals about $26 million, including fee–for–service and managed-care payments, less than half of what the original proposal would have cost them, a spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association said. Nationwide, the proposal will cost about $330 million.

Before the final rule, the New York congressional delegation took issue with the initial proposal to increase the wage index for hospitals that fall in the lowest 25th percentile of wage areas at the expense of hospitals that are above the 75th percentile of wages.

“CMS argues that its proposed changes to the area wage index seek to help rural hospitals, yet not one of New York’s rural hospitals—who face the same fiscal challenges as rural hospitals across the nation—would see a benefit from the policy,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to CMS administrator Seema Verma. “Rather, states like New York with many hospitals that have legitimately high wages commensurate with market competition will be forced to transfer hundreds of millions in Medicare funding to a small handful of states.”

With the issue of wage index out of the way, state hospitals’ greatest concern may now be the finalized uncompensated care pool proposal. Raske noted the Greater New York Hospital Association has “fiercely opposed” the proposal.

“To mitigate the impact of the data issues and reduce the volatility in the uncompensated care distributions, GNYHA had recommended that CMS continue the fiscal year 2019 policy and base the distribution on a weighted average of low-income days and uncompensated care costs,” Raske wrote. “Instead, CMS finalized its proposal to base the distribution on 100% uncompensated care costs using 2015 data.”

In March the Greater New York Hospital Association called the proposal dangerous and said it would base distributions on bad debt and charity care data and cap the pool’s rate of growth, representing a $98 billion cut over 10 years. —Jennifer Henderson

 

 

 

 

Lowering Out-of-Pocket Health Costs Isn’t Easy. States Have Tried

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Cost Management, Cost Reduction, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Medicaid, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pharmaceutical Industry, Price Transparency, Private Interest Groups, Reinsurance, Rev Cycle Management, Surprise Bills • Leave a comment

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U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy shows a chart during a congressional hearing.

Congress has promised to tackle high consumer health-care costs this year. It’s one of the few issues where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle find common ground.

The Lower Health Care Costs Act, introduced in June, is an almost 200-page piece of legislation that seeks to prevent surprise medical bills, lower prescription drug prices and force hospitals to be more transparent about what they bill insurance companies.

But there are already signs of potential failure.

Despite early momentum, Congressional leaders postponed a vote on the measure until after August recess. The pharmaceutical industry as well as hospital and provider groups have started to lobby against the legislation, meeting with President Trump in July to make their case.

Although the Affordable Care Act led to more people having health insurance, many Americans still struggle with out-of-pocket costs, especially ones they weren’t expecting. Meanwhile, health care is taking up an ever-growing size of state budgets. Governors and lawmakers try to tackle this issue almost every legislative session, but few have succeeded in a meaningful way.

“It’s usually a third of state budgets. States have every reason to try and control health-care costs. And yet, everybody struggles to,” says Josh Shaferstein, vice dean of Johns Hopkins University’s Office of Public Health Practice and Training, and a former health secretary for the state of Maryland.

Battling the Health-Care Industry

The first and usually biggest hurdle is private interest groups who see reforms as a threat to their livelihood.

“There are a lot of stakeholders that have vested interest and lobbyists on the ground that will fight tooth and nail, whether it’s doctors and nurses groups or insurance companies. They are perhaps moreso willing to fight at the state level,” says Sabrina Corlette, research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

She points to a bill introduced in Colorado this year that would have capped payments to hospitals in order to lower premiums. After pushback from hospital groups, lawmakers amended the legislation — which was signed into law — so that hospitals will be paid the same but will have to pay back a portion of their revenue to help lower premiums. 

In Washington state, which passed a first-in-the-nation “public option” bill this year, lawmakers rewrote the original legislation after doctor and hospital groups fought a provision that would have set the same cap on provider payments as Medicare. The final legislation reflected a compromise for insurers to pay providers 160 percent of Medicare rates.

At least eight other states discussed or introduced public option bills this year, but they failed to gain traction.

In Delaware — a state that ranks third in health-care spending but 31st in health outcomes — Gov. Jay Carney signed an executive order in November that outlines eight goals the state will work toward to curb the growth in health spending. But Kara Odom Walker, the state’s health secretary, concedes that they weren’t able to convince stakeholders to enact new penalties or regulations.

“Being a small state makes it a lot harder to do things that might be unpopular. Any conversation that includes words like ‘penalty’ or ‘payment cap’ is like a bomb going off,” she says.

The health-care industry is one of the biggest in the country. That gives it a lot of leverage.

“The health systems are often the largest employers in town. The governor says they want to slow health-care spending growth, and the hospital group will say, ‘that means losing jobs,’” says Robert Mechanic, executive director of the Health Industry Forum.

But as Congress tries to lower out-of-pocket costs, they have an asset that states don’t: better data. Corlette says states often lack impartial numbers on potential policies, hurting their ability to assess and defend legislation.

“It’s very hard for your average state legislator to pierce the veil,” Corlette says. “There’s an imbalance of info for legislators to really tackle the problem. They don’t have a Congressional Budget Office.”

One Person’s Savings Are Another’s Costs

Many compare efforts to control health-care costs to a game of whack-a-mole. A state might successfully regulate spending in one area only to see costs skyrocket in another.

“You might be able to cut rates in Medicaid, but then rates will pop up in private insurance. The standard toolkit for states is fraught with political danger,” says Shaferstein.

“Health care is so complex, and there are so many different players. It’s really hard to get your arm around the whole bundle,” says Mechanic.

For instance, Medicare lowered the limit for how long older patients can stay in hospitals. But there’s some evidence that the Medicare savings became extra costs for nursing homes because hospitals started providing fewer services for elderly patients altogether.

State Legislation

When it comes to controlling drug prices, states haven’t made much progress. They have made more headway regulating surprise medical bills.

Half the states have passed surprise billing laws. Only nine of them, though, included “comprehensive protections” that apply to all insurance plans, according to the Commonwealth Fund.

While states have struggled to actually lower drug prices, like Congress plans to do, they have passed laws to make them more transparent and to clamp down on pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who negotiate drug benefits for plans.

Five states have enacted laws that require drug companies to notify them if they will significantly raise the price of a drug, and at least a dozen have restricted the power that a pharmacy benefit manager can have, like requiring them to register with the state.

Solutions That Have Worked

There are some success stories and lessons learned that Congress could use to lower health-care spending in general.

“States should be thinking of more global solutions because you kind of have to go big. Oftentimes people are looking to save $1 to $2 million a year, but that’s not going to make much of a difference,” says Shafterstein.

Only a couple of states have “gone big” in this sense.

Massachusetts passed what became the framework for the federal Affordable Care Act in 2006, known as “RomneyCare,” which requires residents to have health insurance. Health-care spending has since slowed in recent years. Mechanic credits that to the law’s requirements for private health entities to publicly justify price hikes and high spending.

In Maryland, it has taken decades to get health-care spending under control. The state has had an all-payer system for hospitals since the 1970s, meaning they get a fixed sum every month rather than bill insurers for every claim. While that system — which is only used by one other state, Vermont — curbed hospital spending per patient, hospital spending overall grew at a slightly higher rate than the national average.

So in 2014, Maryland forced hospitals to limit their spending to 0.5 percent less than the national growth rate. It has largely been deemed a success, with a report commissioned by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finding that “Maryland hospitals were able to operate within their global budgets without adverse effects on their financial status.”

On a less global scale, states have been able to drive down premiums by implementing reinsurance programs, meaning the government pays for the most expensive patients, taking that bill off insurance companies’ plate.

But reinsurance is like slapping a band-aid on a much larger wound.

“Recent state efforts on reinsurance have worked, but they aren’t really getting at the overall cost of coverage,” says Kevin Lucia, research professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.

 

 

 

Hospital CEO says more price disclosure won’t bring down healthcare costs

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, American Hospital Association (AHA), Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Hospital Industry, Out of Pocket Expenses, Price Transparency, Pricing • Leave a comment

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mount-sinai-hospital-ceo-more-price-disclosure-wont-bring-down-health-care-costs-161029331.html

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The Trump administration is pushing ahead with a new rule that could require hospitals to reveal the prices they negotiated with insurance companies. The White House says the move could help bring the free market into the murky world of health care.

The Trump administration is pushing ahead with a new rule that could require hospitals to reveal the prices they negotiated with insurance companies. The White House says the move could help bring the free market into the murky world of health care.

But the CEO of one of the nation’s largest hospital systems says the rule will just lead to more confusion for consumers.

“You won’t still know what your cost will be even when you look at our prices,” Dr. Kenneth Davis, CEO of the Mount Sinai Health System, told Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade. He says insurers like Cigna (CI), UnitedHealth (UNH), Anthem (ANTM) and Aetna parent CVS Health (CVS) should be the ones to house that information and help customers make sense of it.

“There are so many nuances in the insurance policies that going on our site isn’t going to tell you what you’re really going to pay,” he said. “You need the insurance information, and that’s the information that’s available from the insurance company. They know negotiated prices. So you’re really asking the wrong people to disclose the information.”

The rule could show how widely prices vary between regions and even at hospitals and clinics in the same city. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma called it a “turning point in health care and a turning point to the free market in health care.”

But the hospital industry’s main lobbying group, the American Hospital Association, said in a statement that move could “seriously limit the choices available to patients in the private market and fuel anticompetitive behavior among commercial health insurers in an already highly concentrated insurance industry.”

Hospitals and insurance companies are notoriously secretive about their contract deals, something Dr. Davis attributes to competition between care providers and the insurance companies. Insurers are looking for the best deal, he said, while providers want the highest payment.

“Everyone’s worried about what they will then negotiate with the insurance company,” he said. “The insurance companies are worried, in turn, that other health networks like ours might ask for higher prices.”

Dr. Davis says regulators should be pushing the insurance companies and not the hospitals to disclose pricing.

“We have thousands of items that we would list items on,” he told Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi. “If I have an insurance policy and I go online, I don’t know — still — what my co-pays and deductibles are going to be. Where that information should be is on the insurance company website.”

“I don’t have a problem disclosing that information,” he said. “I just think it’s important that people be able to use that information validly.

Without knowing what their insurance policy covers, he said, “they won’t know what they’re going to pay anyway.”