The Inflation Reduction Act and Community Oncology Practices.

This Viewpoint explains how the Inflation Reduction Act negatively affects reimbursement and may undermine the solvency of community oncology practices and care.

The Inflation Reduction Act and Access to High-Cost Cardiovascular Therapies.

This Viewpoint discusses how the price negotiation for certain drugs under the Inflation Reduction Act will provide a unique opportunity to enhance access to therapies for older patients with cardiovascular conditions and diabetes.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): What Case Managers Should Monitor.

Although this Editorial discusses the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), it will focus on the health provisions only. Many issues can change between the writing of this Editorial and its publication, but here are some nuances of the law that case managers should watch.

Incentive and constraint regulations of rating inflation in collusion over the separation of economic cycles - Markov rating shopping dual reputation model.

Economic cycles may lead to changes in corporate bond credit ratings. This paper utilizes the Markov model to describe transition probability matrixes of economic states for the separation of economic cycles. We develop a new model, which we term the Markov rating shopping dual reputation model, incorporating two reputation effects. This model is well suited to analyze the conditions of the dual rating incentive regulation and the constraint regulation for preventing rating inflation in collusion among credit rating agencies. Then, we apply the Markov regime switching-vector auto-regression (MS-VAR) to estimate the transition probability matrixes of America, England, Japan and China. Based on the numerical analysis and the simulations, the results show that a dual rating regulation can prevent the collusion of inflated ratings, as well as increased rating fees with the separation of economic cycles; additionally, when separating the economic cycles, a constraint regulation is more effective at reducing the risk of rating inflation in collusion and regulatory cost.

Biopsychosocial law, health care reform, and the control of medical inflation in Colorado.

PURPOSE: A noteworthy attempt at health care reform was the 1992 Colorado workers' compensation reform bill, which led to the creation of what has been called "biopsychosocial laws." These laws mandated the use of treatment guidelines for patients with injury or chronic pain, which advocated a biopsychosocial model of rehabilitation, and aspired to use a "best practice" approach to controlling costs. The purpose of this study was to examine the financial impact of this health care reform process, and to test the hypothesis that this approach can be an effective strategy to contain costs while providing good care. RESEARCH METHOD: This study utilized a dataset collected prospectively from 1992 to 2007 in 45 U.S. states for regulatory purposes. These data summarized the medical treatment and disability costs of 520,314 injured workers in Colorado, and an estimated 28.6 million injured workers nationally. As no other state passed a comparable bill, the Colorado worker compensation reform bill created a natural experiment, where a treatment group was created by legally enforceable medical treatment guidelines. RESULTS: In the 15 years following the implementation of the reform, the inflation of medical costs in Colorado workers' compensation was only one third that of the national average, saving an estimated $859 million on patients injured in 2007 alone. CONCLUSIONS: Although there were confounding variables, and causality could not be determined, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that Colorado's 1992 legislative efforts to reform workers compensation law using the biopsychosocial model worked as intended to provide good care while controlling costs.

Medicare program; coverage and payment of ambulance services; inflation update for CY 2004. Final rule with comment period.

This final rule provides the sunset date for the interim bonus payment for rural ambulance mileage of 18 through 50 miles as required by the Medicare, Medicaid and State Child Health Insurance Program Benefits Improvement and Protection Act of 2000 (BIPA) and provides notice of the annual Ambulance Inflation Factor (AIF) for ambulance services for calendar year (CY) 2004. The statute requires that this inflation factor be applied in determining the fee schedule amounts and payment limits for ambulance services.

Medicare and state health care programs and program fraud civil remedies: fraud and abuse; civil money penalties inflation adjustments--Office of Inspector General, HHS. Final rule.

In accordance with Federal Civil Monetary Penalty Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, as amended by the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996, this final rule incorporates the penalty inflation adjustments for the civil money penalties for health case fraud and abuse. These inflation adjustment calculations are not applicable to those civil money penalties contained in the Social Security Act, which are exempted from this adjustment.