For the past 30 years, even with the various headwinds over time, consistent winners in MA have adapted and adjusted to new standards required for success. Now is no different. Short-term headwinds are just that – short-term.

Only actual hospital prices, displayed as dollars and cents, not estimates, formulas, or algorithms, protect patients from outrageous bills and hold hospitals accountable for overcharges, errors, and fraud. Accepting CMS’ or other substitutes instead of actual prices undermines broader efforts to make hospital price transparency a reality for American patients and healthcare consumers.

If we want to support people with obesity, the weight loss debate must stop conflating obesity prevention with obesity treatment. Instead, we should focus on the tools that best solve the needs of people where they are – just as we would for cancer or diabetes – by making the most effective treatments possible available.

The current dual-system model is inefficient, wasteful, and inconvenient. There is a clear need to integrate workers’ comp and medical benefits programs to cut down on costs and alleviate the hassle of dealing with separate care silos. It’s possible, and its time has come.

As the debate over worker misclassification rages, it’s important that healthcare professionals know the facts. Staffing agencies that designate their nurses as independent contractors avoid the costs of employment-related benefits like insurance, workers’ compensation, and overtime pay. These agencies also lack necessary clinical and professional oversight over their contractors, which increases the risk of substandard care.

Staffing agencies are convincing hospitals that it is dangerous to hire nurses like me, telling them that us independent nurses are not equipped to provide quality patient care, and that hiring independent nurses could open the door for legal ramifications.

Twelve short years ago I was a single mother, pregnant and surviving off of food stamps where I relied on the support of the SNAP program. Now, I’ve been given the opportunity to build a platform where I can give a voice to those in similar positions that I once was in and advocate for their needs.

As a first step to move toward greater hospital price transparency and lower costs, CMS can immediately issue $2 million fines on the 30% of American hospitals it concludes are noncompliant. If CMS takes enforcement seriously, the hospital industry will respond by quickly coming into compliance.

CMS should honor its commitment to Medicare beneficiaries, especially those who began home respiratory therapy under the PHE, without requiring them to “restart” the documentation process. Requiring requalification would also be a nightmare for physicians who are already overwhelmed with patient demands.

It is critical for policymakers to work with nephology RNs to increase federal resources that will enable us to address burnout, decrease turnover rates, and build and support a stronger healthcare workforce nationwide.

Creating a category for technologies like the safety release valve would confer benefits, including improved patient safety, reduced costs for the healthcare system overall, and lowered liability risk.

Some financial management service companies have earned the patronage of local governments and prestigious funders, including the National Institutes of Health and AARP. It is time for health plans, particularly MA plans, to pay attention as well.

Virtual first care (V1C) – high-quality healthcare delivered virtually until it cannot be – will allow both new and incumbent providers to achieve success in the redefined value chain.

The hogwash started in The Wall Street Journal with a contrarian take on a recent KPMG technology report. But cloud operates in a fundamentally different paradigm from the IT infrastructure of the past, and embracing big change is rarely free or easy. But the rewards of evolving are obvious and far too great to ignore.

The Covid-19 pandemic challenged the U.S. healthcare system like never before—particularly the segment of the […]

Many have never heard of a pharmacy benefit manager, mega-profitable companies that control what consumers pay for prescription drugs. The FTC’s new probe needs to go far to change the status quo.

Texas has the right environment to help ARPA-H achieve its promise of eliminating existing deficiencies in our national biomedical ecosystem, promoting the integration of multiple disciplines and institutions, and fully addressing persistent inequities in America’s health system.

If FDA’s decision on making hearing aids available over the counter leads to greater adoption, it could encourage consumers to learn more about their condition, and therefore improve the health literacy of the public. The downstream effect of this is to increase the perceived value of the audiologist beyond mere salespeople of a medical device, which audiologists everywhere should applaud.

In the current market where inflation and the costs of healthcare continue to rise, there’s […]

Value-based pricing could have shown us with more certainty the real level of effectiveness of Aduhelm. Maybe it is worth paying something for; and value-based contracts are the only way to figure that out.

Nonhuman primates will be critical to our efforts to understand the long-term effects of Covid-19. Yet scientists conducting critical research have faced harassment and threats.

Without reimbursement policies that can meet the opportunity of this new innovative era, patients and their providers will be denied access to the most cutting-edge, care. 

While pharmaceuticals are a critical piece of the treatment landscape for type 2 diabetes, they have been the exclusive and de-facto first-line treatment for too long. Prescription digital therapeutics can and should be considered as part of type 2 diabetes therapies.

Covid-19 exposed how unhealthy we are as a nation making the case for whole-person care even stronger. All we need now is to focus on redesigning our health care system to deliver this type of care—and muster the courage to do it.

It is time to shift the conversation, incentives, and policy solutions to help people improve their health and get off of medications—not just make them cheaper.

Whether they are acting as a therapeutic or preventive treatment, monoclonal antibodies can allow us to help contain the virus, where we might see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As more patients request direct-to-consumer (DTC) lab tests, medical laboratories will need to reconfigure and upgrade key aspects of their business in order to serve these new healthcare consumers properly. No longer a pure business-to-business endeavor, labs are now finding themselves in the consumer market.

We believe that healthcare leadership’s ingrained culture of exceptionalism drives today’s profound problem whereby patient satisfaction is low, inefficiency is high, and patient outcomes are poor.

Congress must thoroughly investigate the anti-competitive behaviors of these conglomerates and act accordingly. Doing so will provide better outcomes both for patients and a more competitive marketplace for unaffiliated pharmacies.