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What We're Reading: Law Implementing Late Fees in Missouri Medicaid in Limbo
What we're reading, September 21, 2016: Missouri law to charge Medicaid patients for missed doctor's appointments is in limbo; generic drugs' potential to bring down costs; fitness trackers cause people to lose less weight.
A controversial law in Missouri that would charge Medicaid recipients late fees for missing appointments may not go into effect for a year. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri’s Republican-led Legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of the measure, but the future of the law remains in limbo. The law would charge $5 for the first missed appointment and would allow $8 co-pays for Medicaid patients who seek non-emergency care in an emergency room.
Increased focus and attention on rising drug prices can bring about positive results, according to Chip Davis, president and CEO of the Generic Pharmaceutical Association. In a statement, Davis laid out policies and principles for policy makers to consider to promote access to affordable generic drugs and improve development of generics. Davis did address the few instances of generic drugs that have had large price increases and he noted that these are in the minority.
Fitness trackers may be popular, but they aren’t helping people lose weight. A study of overweight or obese young adults who were put on a diet and asked to exercise more with only half given fitness trackers found that people with the trackers lost less weight, reported NPR. There are a few explanations for the outcome, one of which being that people with the trackers may have been able to better see how much they exercised and so they thought they could eat more.
Urticaria Diagnosis Challenged by Overlapping Pruritic Skin Conditions
April 23rd 2025Urticaria is complicated to diagnose by its symptomatic overlap with other skin conditions and the frequent misclassification in literature of distinct pathologies like vasculitic urticaria and bullous pemphigus.
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New Research Challenges Assumptions About Hospital-Physician Integration, Medicare Patient Mix
April 22nd 2025On this episode of Managed Care Cast, Brady Post, PhD, lead author of a study published in the April 2025 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care®, challenges the claim that hospital-employed physicians serve a more complex patient mix.
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Personalized Care Key as Tirzepatide Use Expands Rapidly
April 15th 2025Using commercial insurance claims data and the US launch of tirzepatide as their dividing point, John Ostrominski, MD, Harvard Medical School, and his team studied trends in the use of both glucose-lowering and weight-lowering medications, comparing outcomes between adults with and without type 2 diabetes.
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ACOs’ Focus on Rooting Out Fraud Aligns With CMS Vision Under Oz
April 23rd 2025Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are increasingly playing the role of data sleuths as they identify and report trends of anomalous billing in hopes of salvaging their shared savings. This mission dovetails with that of CMS, which under the new administration plans to prioritize rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse.
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