Years ago, I worked in a long-term acute care hospital. We employed social workers whose job was discharge planning. They charted out where to move patients once they had been treated by our hospital. This process was started before patients were admitted. Patients with no clear path to move elsewhere were not admitted. Our average length of stay was in excess of 30 days. At that time our type of facility was PPS exempt and cost reimbursed based on a TEFRA limit (see p. 71 for more information).
Category: News and Events
HSAs Under Obamacare
Paragon’s updated report …contains 2023 plan information and a distributional analysis from the actuarial firm Milliman. Giving lower-income exchange enrollees an additional way to use their ACA subsidy expands Americans’ welfare since some enrollees would prefer an HSA deposit over the reduction of their plans’ cost-sharing components.
Struggling NHS Considers More Rationing, Cutting Services and Charging Wealthy
The Scottish National Health Service has some of the worst treatment times in the United Kingdom. Thirty-seven percent of people entering the emergency department in late October had to wait more than four hours to be admitted, transferred or treated. The NHS struggles to hire workers and struggles to treat all those who need care. Supposedly the founding principles of the NHS is that care is free and paid for by tax dollars rather than charging patients for care.
Monday Links
- Ross Douthat on Effective Altruism. (recommended)
- Sen. Cassidy becomes the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee. The Democratic Chairman is Bernie Sanders.
- How easy should it be to get an abortion pill?
- Food stamps account for 20% of Coke’s revenues. This is a program that was started, you may remember, as an effort to improve nutrition among low-income families.
- Do antidepressants really work? That’s debatable. (NYT)
- AMA president on Dobbs: “I never imagined colleagues would find themselves tracking down hospital attorneys before performing urgent abortions, when minutes count … asking if a 30% chance of maternal death, or impending renal failure, meet the criteria for the state’s exemptions…”
In fact, life and death decisions are made in hospitals all the time by physicians who know full well that lawyers will be looking over their shoulders. That’s probably not a bad thing.