Free Republic

Nationally, 724 hospitals have had their Medicare funding reduced after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that each had high rates of potentially avoidable “hospital-acquired conditions,” including falls, bed sores, and certain infections, including ventilator acquired pneumonia and catheter-associated urinary tract infections. CMS scored hospitals on the prevalence of three risk factors to their Medicare population patients: central line bloodstream infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, and serious complications, a catch-all group made up of eight types of injuries, including blood clots, falls, and bed sores. Funding can be reinstated for hospitals whose scores improve in the targeted areas.

An Obamacare-created and taxpayer-funded insurance company in Iowa has been taken over by the state due to a financial crisis. CoOportunity Health is Iowa’s insurance cooperative — a nonprofit insurance company created by the Affordable Care Act to supposedly undercut the large, for-profit insurers that Democrats castigated as “greedy” and “evil” during the debate over health care reform. After just beginning to offer plans in 2013, the company’s already insolvent and has now been taken over by the state of Iowa, insurance commissioner Nick Gerhart announced Wednesday. CoOpportunity doesn’t have enough cash on hand to be sure it can pay claims for its...

Health Reform: It seems the administration had been exaggerating the number of people enrolled in ObamaCare to the tune of about 700,000. We're shocked! Shocked! At a hearing Thursday, Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, finally confessed that 7.3 million were enrolled in ObamaCare plans as of mid-August. In other words, the administration had been inflating the "enrollment" number nearly 10% by counting anyone who had completed the application process, not those who paid their premiums. Now, they say it's no big deal, because everyone expected some attrition. But even this new, lower number is...

The law created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to launch experiments in every state, changing the way doctors and hospitals are paid, building networks between caregivers and training them to intervene before chronic illness gets worse. The center’s ten-year, $10 billion budget is the largest ever devoted to transforming care. In several states the office is working to overhaul medicine for nearly all residents — not just those with government Medicare and Medicaid coverage. Hundreds of organizations have gotten money. More than $2 billion has been doled out or committed since 2011. One of the biggest experiments is...