Category Archives: Uncategorized
Survey reveals 3 value-based payment trends to watch
Cartoon – Cash Flow Problems
‘Just exactly how bad is our cash flow problem?’
Former UAB Hospital food services employee charged with $1M cash theft
Federal prosecutors charged a former University of Alabama at Birmingham employee with stealing more than $1 million over six years from a cash room she oversaw.
Kyejuana Avery was charged Friday with one count of theft between 2008 and 2013 concerning programs receiving federal funds. The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed the charge, along with a plea agreement, in U.S. District Court. Avery will plead guilty to the charge and will pay restitution to UBA in an amount to be determined at sentencing. The maximum penalty for theft concerning programs receiving federal funds is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Ms. Avery had worked as a financial account representative at UAB in the Hospital Food and Nutrition Services Department from 2007 to 2013. She was responsible for the “Cash Room,” where cashiers from various food and beverage locations throughout the hospital are able to exchange high denomination bills for smaller bills and coins to make change for customers.
NYU Langone, Winthrop-University Hospital to begin merger talks
13 recent healthcare industry lawsuits, settlements
11 recent hospital outlook and credit rating actions
Payments for cost sharing increasing rapidly over time
http://www.healthsystemtracker.org/insight/payments-for-cost-sharing-increasing-rapidly-over-time/
Rising cost-sharing for people with health insurance has drawn a good deal of public attention in recent years. For example, the average deductible for people with employer-provided health coverage rose from $303 to $1,077 between 2006 and 2015.
While we can get a sense of employees’ potential exposure to out-of-pocket costs by looking at trends in deductibles, many employees will never reach their deductibles and other employees may have costs that far exceed their deductibles. In addition to deductible payments, some employees also have copayments (set dollar amounts for a given service) or coinsurance payments (a percentage of the allowed amount for the service). To look at what workers and their families actually spend out-of-pocket for services covered by their employer-sponsored plan, we analyzed a sample of health benefit claims from the Truven MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters Database to calculate the average amounts paid toward deductibles, copayments and coinsurance.
We find that, between 2004 and 2014, average payments for deductibles and coinsurance rose considerably faster than the overall cost for covered benefits, while the average payments for copayments fell.
Knowing How Doctors Die Can Change End-Of-Life Discussions
PREPARING FOR PANDEMICS
During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, as many as 100 million people died — up to 5 percent of the world’s population. If a similar outbreak were to happen today, the death toll could reach 360 million, despite the availability of vaccines as well as modern antiviral and antibacterial drugs. The economic impact would also be devastating, resulting in a $3 trillion economic loss, or nearly 5 percent of global GDP.
