Posted on 01/02/2014 6:11:31 AM PST by rawhide
The contractor building the financial management system for Healthcare.gov is being blamed by a Houston hospital for delayed Medicare reimbursements that have caused the hospital to miss payrolls for weeks. Novitas Solutions is the federal government's new Medicare payment processor for the south-central region of the country hired by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS.) ABC-KTRK in Houston reports:
According to the CEO Jason Leday, more than 150 employees haven't been paid in nearly a month.
"I understand that they have children and a house payment, bills. Not getting paid is wow," nearby resident Theresa Gutierrez said.
The hospital is strapped for cash not because its not making money, but because Leday says a new Medicare payment facilitator named Novitas Solutions is taking too way long to pay out Medicare claims to the hospital.
Leday says he's owed nearly $3 million in payments from Medicare and can't make payroll...
The Texas Medical Association says they are familiar with complaints like this one regarding the medicare payment facilitator- and a representative told us smaller community hospitals like this one are in similar situations.
Novitas also runs the south-central region's Medicare website which was launched just two days before the October 1 launch of Healthcare.gov. As THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on December 19, that site has experienced problems reminiscent of Healthcare.gov's troubles, and the site will not be fully operational until well into 2014.
Novitas's direct connection to Healthcare.gov stems from an emergency, no-bid contract for "financial management services" awarded in August...
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Mack Daddy strikes again
That poor bureaucrat is sure going to be busy.
and it will only get worse… and as this continues people will leave which means there will be fewer people to staff the hospital and the care will tank…. just like in the UK with their wonderful NHI
They have to wait all this time for the gutless Republicans in the House and Senate to appease Democrats and secure a budget that has more holes in it than block of Swiss Cheese with gas.
So we not only have $1T being printed up by the Fed to buy T-bills and MBSs on the stock market, we are going another Trillion in debt to pay for the increased Medicaid, subsidies and Medicare costs created by Obamacare.
Think of a daughter, or wife, coked-out or massiverly hormone-deficient with absolutely no care in the world about tomorrow or next week - only that they are compelled to spend to satiate their self-indulgent appetites. This is your government.
an “emergency no-bid contract”
eh
follow the money trail to whatever democrat connected crony/donor runs and benefits from Novitus. Wanna bet they haven’t missed a paycheck or a political donation
My first thought too.
I would like to see a state judge just walk up to this contractor and put a couple of state police at the doors...then ask them to pull out the finance records. No one leaves the building until everything is perfectly clear. It’d take about twelve hours for someone in this group to start freaking out and showing everything.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out the money was allocated but mysteriously disappeared like the stimulus and green energy trillions. No one knows where that money went yet either. Poof! It simply vanished into thin air.
Ping.
One of the primary reasons all these private practices are hooking up w/ hospitals, slow reimbursements.
A friend’s doctor told him the only private practices to survive will be the ones that can make it for about a year w/ no reimbursements coming in. If they can make it , they’ll likely be ok.
They do this all the time. A doctor can submit his claims, and it might take up to 3 months before he/she is paid. Especially if both the primary Medicare and secondary Tricare Life (Ret. Military over 65) are admind from the same office.
Sorry blogger doesn’t even name the hospital. You have to click through to the real story from ABC to get that.
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=9372756
(St. Anthony’s)
And if the hospital really can’t afford to make payroll for a month, they either need to file bankruptcy (where certain employee salaries would get preference) or they need to be shut down.
Unfortunately, there will be hospitals and practices that will go out of business as a result of this legislation.
Because of this lack of access, people will die. You won't be able to directly attribute their deaths to specific hospitals, so the enemedia will never report their deaths as such.
It's going to get ugly.
Can't the hospital get it's billing factored, at least for the amount of the payroll?
Maybe they could refuse to take Medicare patients for elective procedures and visits until they are paid.
I’ll bet this will happen when administrators and insurers fail to pay.
Oh wait . . .
That's an option, but not much different than going to a loan shark. It puts you into the death spiral that is very difficult to escape.
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