Friday, October 17, 2014

Friday LinkFest

■ The Bay State's Medicaid explosion, er, expansion looks to be growing at a much faster clip than originally anticipated. Wonder why?

Wonder no longer:

"[A]nalysis of financial filings indicates that the subsidized Medicaid program known as MassHealth has for the past four years incurred $500 million in deficits that have been hidden by a quirk in the state’s budget process."

Ooops. And this has been going on for quite a while, racking up "billions in cash shortfalls."

■ While we've been focusing on the financial implications of The ObamaTax, the impact on the delivery of health care is equally critical. And equally in shambles:

"Doctors are ramping up our protests against the government's expanding role into health care ... We are instead protesting silently through our practice decisions."

And the "practice decision" being made by an increasing number of doc's is: we're outta here.

■ We've posted before on the fact that the Exchanges are quick to take folks cash, not so quick to pay out commissions to those who actually helped people navigate (heh) the onerous 404Care site. That may be changing:

"The long-awaited fix to the National Producer Number (NPN) is expected to be in place by Nov. 15 and will allow brokers to enter their identifiable information and receive commissions"

What's stupid is that we've been using the NPN numbers for a long time now - in fact, it's the only acceptable form of identification for many states' Continuing Education requirements. Why am I not surprised that the Feds are so far behind on this simple piece of infrastructure?
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