A premise of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to provide “affordable coverage” to more Americans with the idea being that newly insured individuals and families will have enhanced “access” to quality health care. Whitehouse Policy Snapshot. Particularly important is access to primary care, the means by which millions of…
The strain of health care reform and third-party-payer bureaucracy will likely continue to push physicians towards non-traditional business models for practicing medicine. This is especially true for non-specialists. As the trend of physicians to find viable practice model alternatives grows, it is widely expected that the number of direct pay…
More than ever, physician innovation is needed in business models for medical practices to deal with problems associated with our cumbersome third party payer healthcare system. Our Atlanta health care law firm supports direct pay practice medicine as a positive trend. Many doctors are now setting up direct pay (a/k/a…
Controlling healthcare costs is essential to the economic security of the United States. Total healthcare spending in the U.S., already an astronomical $3 trillion dollars in 2013, is expected to grow almost 6% annually through 2022.1 Spiraling healthcare costs is an obvious problem on many levels, including the fact that,…
Medicare payments to community health centers are expected to increase by as much as $1.3 billion over the next five years, according to Bloomberg News, based on a new prospective payment system. On April 30, 2014, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services…
Shopping savvy largely derives from the discomfort of parting with money. If health insurance pays all (or most) of the bill for healthcare services, why should the patient care what the cost of the healthcare is, how such cost is calculated, or how cost might be reduced? But as a…
House Republicans gained the support of 27 Democrats and passed The Suspending the Individual Mandate Penalty Law Equals Simple (SIMPLE) Fairness Act (H.R. 4118), a bill that would delay for one year the Affordable Care Act (ACA) individual mandate penalty tax for those failing to buy health insurance before the…
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), widely known as “Obamacare,” will create new opportunities for primary care doctors (and some specialists) who weigh starting or converting to a direct primary care model. At first blush direct care medicine practices, also known as “concierge,” “boutique” and “retainer-based” practices, which charge patients a…
The price Americans will pay for Affordable Care Act (ACA) changes may include lost wages and job benefits due to the price tag of ACA compliance for employers. It may seem to many like a good and noble thing to require insurers to insure everyone irrespective of health conditions and…
Nationwide there is much consternation and debate about what sort of “healthcare reform” might cure our health care system’s many ills, its growing price tag in particular. Of course, there is no shortage of answers and opinions about possible solutions or improvements. To be sure, the issue is highly complex,…