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CMS proposes waiting longer to pay Medicare ‘bounty hunters’
Medicare officials want to make it harder for their recovery-audit companies to collect fees for auditing hospital and doctor bills. Earlier this week, the Government Accountability Office gave the CMS the go-ahead to make the change despite protests from the auditors. Recovery auditing is a major…
Will ObamaCare Prove More Costly Than Medicare and Medicaid?
One consistent argument in favor of expanding government-run health care in the U.S. goes like this: “We’re the richest country in the developed world, so we should be able to provide universal health care like all the other developed countries.”…
Bipartisan Policy Center Launches New Personal Savings Initiative
As fewer Americans accumulate sufficient savings and the solvency of Social Security is threatened, how Americans adequately prepare for retirement has become a critical question. To address this long-term challenge, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) today announced the launch of…
Medical bills will eat your Social Security
Here is a stark reminder that Medicare covers only a portion of retiree medical expenses: According to a retirement health-cost index published last week, a couple retiring in 2015 with average Social Security benefits can expect medical costs to consume…
What if retirement advice is completely backwards?
Financial advisers for decades have urged people to load up on equities early in their careers and gradually reduce those holdings by the time they leave the workforce. Sounds logical. When you’re in your 20s, you have plenty of time to…
Retirement Remains Americans’ Top Financial Worry
A firm majority of Americans, 59%, are worried about not having enough money for retirement, surpassing eight other financial matters. A majority of Americans have reported being “very” or “moderately” worried about retirement savings every year since 2001, illustrating that…
Why Retirement Saving Shouldn’t Always Precede College Saving
Financial advice tends to be given on all-or-nothing terms. The real world is not that simple. Take saving for your children’s education. Conventional wisdom is that you should assign your own retirement saving a higher priority than saving for your children’s…
Several Influential doctors groups openly promoting denial of treatment based on age, disability, and other critieria
In “Treatment Cost Could Influence Doctors’ Advice,” the New York Times’s Andrew Pollack reports that several major physician groups are poised to begin openly considering cost when seeking to deny life-saving treatment—and that some of them are explicitly calling for…
Medicare’s $5 Billion Ambulance Tab Signals Area of Abuse
The patient smoked cigarettes in the passenger seat of the ambulance every week, chatting with the driver while taxpayers foot the $1,000 bill to drive him four blocks for his dialysis treatment. The routine was part of a $1.5 million scheme…
Retirement costs at heart of food service contract decision
Carlisle Area School District is expecting to turn a $500,000 annual operating deficit into a $200,000 surplus in the first year of its contract with Chartwells. The school board recently agreed to outsource the management of the district food service operation…