The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has importantly revised the methodology for estimating annual national health expenditures. Among other changes, the revisions estimated out-of-pocket spending directly, disaggregated expenditures to a greater degree, and reduced undercounting and double counting. Estimates of total spending and out-of-pocket spending changed. This article summari...

This article reports on the State Health Expenditure Account (SHEA) project which developed procedures States can use in tracking their health care expenditures. The purposes, priorities, and concepts of SHEAs were designed to meet the needs of State policymakers. The resulting methods are discussed and illustrated using calculations of SHEAs for California. Contrasts with the National Health E...

Health care providers, patients, the end stage renal disease (ESRD) networks, and HCFA have developed the ESRD Health Care Quality Improvement Program (HCQIP) in an effort to assess and improve care provided to ESRD patients. Currently, the ESRD HCQIP focuses on collecting information on quality indicators (QIs) for treatment of anemia, delivery of adequate dialysis, nutritional status, and blo...

Study population The study population comprised patients who had undergone primary cadaveric kidney transplant. The study sample comprised two Neoraland three Sim-treated cohorts of patients, who were enrolled in prospective randomised doubleblind clinical trials in the USA and Europe. In addition, there was a cohort of 4,727 Sim-treated first cadaveric transplant recipients selected from the U...

Half of all Medicaid enrollees receive care through comprehensive risk-based managed care organizations (MCOs). Most Medicaid MCO enrollees today are low-income children and parents, but states are increasingly moving beneficiaries with more complex needs into MCOs. Enrollment of highneed groups in managed care may grow more rapidly as states work with the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Servic...

Introduction Both Romania and Turkey started the implementation of case-mix systems as a tool to be used for acute inpatient care reimbursement by the public insurance system, in the context of inflationist, non-transparent and non-equitable reimbursements at the time. Romania used the HCFA DRG system for the initial phases (2000–2005), and it is currently using the AR DRG system for full reimb...

The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has proposed incorporating hospital capital payments into the Medicare prospective payment system. HCFA's proposal includes an adjustment to capital payments for geographic differences in capital costs, derived from the prospective payment system area hospital wage index. Alternatively, the geographic adjustment could be based on an area construct...

l w v t r w o o i m h c b r p r c c t v s h s T e c d w v p o a he U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have announced, and presented for comment, the third phase of its regulations against physician self-referral.” The Stark self-referral regulation, as it is ommonly known (formally, the Medicare Program: Phyicians’ Referrals to Health Care Entities With Which They ave Financial...

OBJECTIVE To examine and describe regional variation in outcomes for persons with stroke receiving inpatient medical rehabilitation. DESIGN Retrospective cohort design. SETTING Inpatient rehabilitation units and facilities contributing to the Uniform Data System for Medical Rehabilitation from the United States. PARTICIPANTS Patients (N=143,036) with stroke discharged from inpatient rehab...

In response to a rising concern for multidrug resistance and Clostridium difficile infections, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) will require all long-term care (LTC) facilities to establish an antibiotic stewardship program by November 2017. Thus far, limited evidence describes implementation of antibiotic stewardship in LTC facilities, mostly in academic- or hospital-affili...