Word: billing
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...digging ourselves further into a very costly hole. On the right, the talking points were that the speech was insufficiently militant and that Obama failed to provide a sense of assured victory. But, then again, it’s hard to know exactly what the commentariat was looking for. Bill O’Reilly criticized that Tuesday’s speech “was no Gettysburg address.” I suppose that if your standard for every speech is that it be the greatest in American political history, you will suffer occasional disappointment...
...Even more damaging in the view of many reformers is a little-noticed deal that Senate majority leader Harry Reid cut to get the support he needed to bring the bill to the floor of his chamber. The original Finance Committee bill would have triggered the commission's recommendations whenever the rate of increase in Medicare spending outpaced overall economic growth - something that happens almost every year. But the current version would allow it to make recommendations only when Medicare spending per capita grows faster than overall health costs. That almost never occurs. The change in economic measuring sounds technical...
...says both the House and Senate versions of the bill would cut the deficit in the long run. But even the CBO acknowledges that its predictions are highly uncertain and based on forecasting models that assume that most of the bill's untested reforms will actually work. To skeptics, that seems too good to be true, especially with millions of new patients coming into the system. While families' health bills may go down, they say, costs for the government - and ultimately taxpayers - are sure to rise. "I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that...
...Senate version of the bill also requires that representatives of the drug industry, the diagnostic-equipment business and medical-device makers - all of which have a financial stake in the results of comparative-effectiveness research - hold seats on the governing board of the new agency in charge of it. The potential for conflict of interest has raised alarms among some in the research community. But Obama's top health adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, contends that it's a sign that some of comparative effectiveness's most ardent foes have come around to the idea that technologies and treatments have...
...turns out, however, lawmakers are reluctant to cede the power to steer extra money to hospitals in their own districts, and the House rejected the commission idea outright. While the Senate bill does contain a version of the commission, it has become weaker at every turn in the process. Under a deal to win hospitals' support for the bill, the Senate Finance Committee agreed they would be exempt from the commission's recommendations at least through 2019; doctors, hospices and medical-equipment suppliers would be beyond its reach entirely. Who is left? Maybe no one. "The exception for hospitals...