Potential Medicare cuts called for by the Affordable Care Act will not occur, a chief government actuary has announced. Long-term care organizations said the news comes as a relief for providers who have weathered a series of recent payment reductions.
February 01, 2013
The fiscal cliff avoidance deal seems to prove an adage about politics being the art of compromise. But as tradeoffs go, long-term care providers didn't fare too badly.
January 03, 2013
Long-term operators are cheering that Congress averted cutting Medicare payments through sequestration this week, and they're glad that another one-year postponement of physician pay cuts didn't come at their expense.
October 29, 2012
I recently had the good fortune of interviewing three of the industry's top association executives. If their collective advice could be distilled to a bumper sticker-sized message, here's how it would read: Change is here, deal with it.
October 28, 2012
Like sitting in a tub of hot cocoa on the shore of an enchanted mountain lake while listening to a choir of violin-wielding angels. That's about how it felt to spend some quality time last week at the LeadingAge conference in Denver.
October 26, 2012
The current policies of the Affordable Care Act push innovation, which is crucial to the success of the long-term care industry, LeadingAge President and CEO Larry Minnix told McKnight's.
October 23, 2012
Hours before the final presidential debate started Monday, LeadingAge President and CEO Larry Minnix made it clear whom he thought long-term care providers need to vote for. While not outright campaigning for President Obama, Minnix said the incumbent's policies would be better for the future of the profession than those proposed by his challenger, Mitt Romney.
October 17, 2012
October is for many of us in the long-term care field what December is to others.
June 28, 2012
While the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, it struck a provision that said states would lose their Medicaid funding if they don't comply with the planned expansion.The ruling means progressive action on maximizing Medicaid reimbursement is still needed, a top long-term care advocate told McKnight's.
May 08, 2012
Long-term care providers should hone in on the changing needs of their market by embracing what customers want and will pay for, and by working to change the profession's image problem, LTC executives said Monday.
LeadingAge will host its spring annual meeting Sunday through Wednesday in Washington. Typically considered a "Capitol Hill fly-in" during which providers meet with their respective states' lawmakers to push the LeadingAge agenda, the meeting also will feature keynote speakers, workshops and educational sessions throughout. There also will be an exhibit hall Monday morning. Educator and a co-author of the best-selling "Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard" Dan Heath will deliver the keynote leadership address Monday morning.
February 08, 2012
Provider groups are urging President Obama to consider nursing home funding when he releases his fiscal 2013 budget next week. The budget proposal is expected to include Medicare cuts worth $248 billion and Medicaid cuts of up to $72 billion.
Non-profit aging services executives will have a new place to learn ideas by attending the LeadingAge's PEAK Leadership Summit this spring.
Advocates for the CLASS Act can take some comfort in knowing that efforts for full repeal of the program are at a dead end, at least for the rest of this year.
LeadingAge President and CEO Larry Minnix openly acknowledged Wednesday afternoon that the next two years could be tense and difficult for long-term care providers. He was just one of a handful of experts painting a grave outlook.
If opponents of the CLASS Act think they've beaten down or somehow subdued chief advocate Larry Minnix or his LeadingAge members, they have another thing coming. Despite a week of roiling controversy and confusion that has some official sources leaving it for dead, CLASS still has an active champion in Minnix. That much was abundantly clear in a video interview with McKnight's on Wednesday.
October 18, 2011
The Department of Health and Human Services may have shelved the CLASS long-term care benefit, but advocates of the program said mixed messages from the White House suggest otherwise. One major provider association said it would continue to fight to keep the program alive while another issued a statement Monday that was more resigned that the CLASS Act was all but dead.
October 16, 2011
When the White House effectively killed the CLASS Act, the program's most vocal advocates dug in their heels in hopes of resurrecting the long-term care insurance program.
The chief actuary for the Department of Health and Human Service's CLASS Act program has said HHS is shutting down its CLASS office and that he no longer has a job, according to published reports.
September 16, 2011
Health and Human Services officials were concerned about the sustainability of the CLASS Act prior to the bill's passage, according to a new report.
August 01, 2011
Provider groups slammed the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Friday after the agency issued a final rule that would reduce Medicare payments to skilled nursing facilities by $3.87 billion for fiscal year 2012.
July 20, 2011
Providers immediately ripped a new deficit-reduction proposal Tuesday that was announced by a bipartisan group of influential U.S. Senators and endorsed at least modestly by both the White House and some key Republicans. The nearly complete proposal, cobbled together within two weeks of the United States possibly starting to default on its financial obligations, would slash numerous areas of healthcare spending and eliminate the nation's first government-sponsored long-term care insurance program.
Nursing homes and assisted living facilities are once again exempt from paying movie-licensing fees, thanks to an agreement with the Motion Picture Licensing Corporation.
March 18, 2011
The Community Living Assistance and Services and Supports (CLASS) Act will be repealed if physician-congressman Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) has his way. Gingrey said Thursday that he intended to unveil a bill later that day that would negate the CLASS Act, a tenet of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
March 10, 2011
Marketplace and policy changes will place unprecedented pressure on providers to diversify and expand how they do business, according to panelists at a skilled care program in Los Angeles.
January 27, 2011
President Obama defiantly said he would fight any repeal efforts to his health care reform platform but added in his State of the Union address Tuesday night that he would remain open to ideas for improving it. He also called for more spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid but didn't offer any specifics.
December 23, 2010
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) has released the hold on the nomination of Michelle Leonhart to head the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. That occurred after the U.S. Department of Justice assured him that the DEA would address and improve the delivery of pain medications in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
Robyn Stone, senior vice president for research at the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, has been selected to serve on the Department of Labor's Advisory Committee on Apprenticeship.
August 11, 2010
President Obama Tuesday signed a bill sending $26.1 billion in aid, including $16.1 billion in Medicaid relief, to states.
Amid your daily workload and the whir of summer, a couple birthdays may have slipped by you. I'm speaking of the 45th anniversaries of Medicare and Medicaid.
