Senate leaders have reached an agreement to extend a Medicare pay bump for health care providers through 2021, a major lobbying win for hospitals. Senate leaders cut a deal on Tuesday, just days ahead of the March 31 deadline when the 2% pay boost is set to expire, according to bill text obtained by STAT. Congress last year gave providers the boost to help their bottom lines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Biden administration is committing nearly $10 billion to address a problem that has bedeviled health officials overseeing the coronavirus immunization effort: inequities in vaccine coverage based on race, income and geography.
Hospitals that have published their previously confidential prices to comply with a new federal rule have also blocked that information from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites, according to a Wall Street Journal examination. The information must be disclosed under a federal rule aimed at making the $1 trillion sector more consumer friendly. But hundreds of hospitals embedded code in their websites that prevented Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other search engines from displaying pages with the price lists, according to the Journal examination of more than 3,100 sites.
A $300 million donation to Sanford Health is intended to improve rural care across South Dakota, expand Sanford's graduate medical education, expand the sports complex in Sioux Falls and build a “virtual hospital of the future,” officials said. The donation comes from the health care system's namesake, Denny Sanford.
A cost-saving change in Medicare launched in the final days of the Trump administration will cut payments to hospitals for some surgical procedures while potentially raising costs and confusion for patients. For years, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) classified 1,740 surgeries and other services so risky for older adults that Medicare would pay for them only when these adults were admitted to the hospital as inpatients. Under the new rule, the agency is beginning to phase out that requirement. On Jan. 1, 266 shoulder, spine and other musculoskeletal surgeries were crossed off what is called the “inpatient-only list.”