The American Medical Response ambulance service has agreed to pay $600,000 to settle claims by the federal and state government’s that it improperly billed the Medicaid and Medicare government insurance programs for services. The federal and state governments claimed that AMR billed for paramedic services at the scenes of emergency responses when in fact the services were performed by local fire departments, federal authorities said.
A report released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) estimates nearly $88 billion in past-due medical bills for the 2021 year. Additionally, the report found that 20% of households in the United States have medical debt.
The American Medical Association (AMA) recently announced three new CPT codes for administration of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in children 6 months to under 5 years old.
Emergency department visits and hospitalizations of Medicare Advantage (MA) beneficiaries can be reduced by value-based care, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open.
Leonard Rosen was an institution in Northern Virginia, delivering more than 10,000 babies in the course of a four-decade career and offering guidance to thousands of women. He did humanitarian work in Bolivia; he helped develop less-invasive and more-affordable treatments; he offered no-cost treatment to women who could not afford care. But last year, he abruptly retired and closed his practice — a few months before admitting in federal court in Alexandria that he had participated in a fraud scheme by prescribing expensive scar creams in exchange for kickbacks.
State public health officials are touting a new law set to go into effect this year aimed at preventing "surprise" billing by health care providers. Gov. Charlie Baker signed the law in 2021 requiring that health care providers tell patients how much they will pay for planned hospital stays, medical procedures, healthcare services and referrals -- based on their individual health plans.
