By I. Glenn Cohen I have a new paper on the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, just published in the European peer-reviewed philosophy journal Ethical Perspectives. It is available for free download here. Here is the abstract: While NFIB v. Sebelius largely upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it did not do…
By: Katie Booth The Obama administration announced in February that it would allow Arkansas to use the federal money intended for Medicaid expansion to buy private health insurance plans for individuals with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level. This week, Florida’s senate rejected the Medicaid expansion but left open the possibility that…
By Nadia N. Sawicki Two recent publications prompt me to ask this question. The first, forthcoming in JAMA Internal Medicine, is a study by Jaime Rosenthal, a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Rosenthal and her colleagues set out to obtain pricing data for total hip arthroplasty from 20 top-ranked orthopedic hospitals and 102 representative…
By: Katie Booth The looming sequester will have a significant impact on health care, including cuts to Medicare, FDA, CDC, NIH, and Affordable Care Act programs. Budget cuts could slow down the drug approval process, impede the tracking of infectious diseases, and lead to layoffs for hundreds of thousands of workers in the health care…
By Jonathan J. Darrow An earlier post discussed the equivocal efficacy of Propecia (finasteride) as a baldness remedy, ending with the provocative assertion that, efficacy aside, “there is little reason for anyone ever to buy or consume Propecia (finasteride), or any doctor ever to prescribe it, since a much cheaper and identical chemical sold under…
By Katie Booth In the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Auburn Regional Medical Center, the Court held that a suit against HHS by eighteen hospitals alleging intentional underpayment of Medicare reimbursements was barred by a 180-day internal agency deadline for appeals of reimbursement decisions. The rub is that the hospitals only found out about the…
By Nicolas Terry As is well known ACA § 3025 (§1886(q) Social Security Act) established the Hospital Readmissions Reduction program. This is operationalized through deductions built into the Hospital IPPS (Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems) Rule which sets the Medicare reimbursement amounts, here. The excess readmissions ratio initially only applies to readmissions based on MI, Heart Failure,…
