Medicaid and Medicare

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(MedPage Today) -- The East Coast's largest drugstore chain, Rite Aid, settled a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy violation case with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for $1 million.

(MedPage Today) -- Virtual colonoscopy is cost-effective only when priced lower than conventional colonoscopy or if it attracts a large unscreened population, according to computer models of colon cancer screening strategies.

(MedPage Today) -- National Football League teams will be hanging a poster in their locker rooms this season, describing symptoms of concussions and, for the first time, warning of the potential long-term consequences.

(MedPage Today) -- A risk score based on a number of uncommon genetic variants appears to predict risk of estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer but with questionable clinical utility, researchers said.

How to get your State Pension forecast

 

What is a State Pension forecast?

A State Pension forecast, is a service offered by the Department of Work and Pensions www.dwp.gov.uk , to give you an idea of the retirement income you may receive from your State Pension. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) who authorises and regulates the financial services industry in the UK, recommend that once you have started a pension or any other form of retirement savings, you should keep them under regular review. Every year you should receive a pension statement from each of your pension providers showing you how much pension income you may receive, based on the current value of your pension fund and taking into consideration; future payments, how the funds might grow and the effects of inflation. Don’t forget this is only an illustration and there can be no guarantee how funds may perform in the future, but it will give you some form of indication.

What will my state pension forecast include?

Your State Pension forecast will give you information on what retirement income you might be eligible to receive on reaching retirement age.

An estimate of your Basic State Pension.

An estimate of your State Second Pension (formerly known as the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme – SERPS)

 

 

What will my state pension forecast tell me?

The number of years you have been paid or have been credited with National Insurance Contributions know as the number of qualifying years.

An estimated current value of your State Pension, based on your National Insurance record to date.

An estimate of the State Pension income you are likely to receive at State Pension retirement age, based on what you have already paid and any future payments that you are likely to make or contributions that you are likely to credited with.

An estimate of how much you could increase your State Pension by if you put off claiming for it until after State Retirement Age

What could be done to improve your Basic State Pension

The effects a company pension or personal scheme will have on your State Second Pension

Whether you can include the use of National Insurance Contribution made by a late or former spouse or civil partner.

 

 

How do I get my State Pension forecast?

You can make an application for your State Pension forecast either online, by phone or by post. In order to make an online application you must live in the UK, be more than four months from receiving your State Pension and not widowed. For applications made by phone or post again you must ensure that you live in the UK and are more than 30 days from State Pension age. When you do apply by phone or by post, if you are within the 30 days your application will not be able to be processed. A postal application form BR19 can de downloaded from the direct.gov website.

 

What information will I be asked to supply?

When making your application you will be asked to supply the following information:

Your National Insurance number (NI) and the National Insurance number of your spouse or civil partner.

What types of contributions you are paying depending on your employment status.

Particulars on marriages, civil partnerships and annulments.

Whether or not you have spent time working outside of the UK.

Details of your current salary.

What if I don’t understand my State Pension forecast?

Understanding your State Pension forecast is important. If you have problems understanding it or for more information visit

www.direct.gov.uk

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Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Announces New Information Tracking System

You’ve likely heard the term dashboard as it relates to your car. However, it is also a term that is used in business to describe a web-based technology page which provides a real-time analysis of a business operation. In the same way that your car dashboard displays how your vehicle is performing, the dashboard of a business shows how it is performing.

 

Well, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has its own dashboard now and it allows them to track how much is spent on Medicare patients in hospitals. The expectation is that more data will eventually be added, but for now this new interactive CMS dashboard is geared toward helping the public visualize and analyze Medicare spending.

 

What the New CMS Dashboard Offers Medicare Beneficiaries

 

In response to a White House Open Government Directive (transparency) this new dashboard includes a limited set of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) and hospitals paid under the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS).

 

IPPS is the system for reimbursing hospitals for inpatient health care services at a predetermined rate for treatment of specific illnesses. When a hospital sends Medicare a bill, the diagnosis and treatment information assign the admission to a DRG. The DRG and other adjustments based on hospital characteristics and the patient’s stay determine how much Medicare pays.

 

DRG is a patient classification system that relates types of acute care inpatients treated to the resources they consume. “The system looks at those cases that are clinically similar and that consume similar resources,” says Alan Weinstock, insurance broker at http://www.MedicareSupplementPlans.com. “CMS uses DRG grouping, pricing and editing software to calculate the DRG assignment and subsequently the reimbursement for every Medicare claim.”

 

By matching each DRG with an assigned payment weight, Medicare beneficiaries as well as other Americans will have the ability to compare costs, to see where their taxpayer dollars are being spent and to understand what types of results are being produced. In addition, this information can be used by government and industry to assess health care policies, improve the management of health care and identify areas for change

 

The dashboard provides information on the top 25 DRGs as well as the top 10 hospitals for each of those DRGs. The information contained in the dashboard is based solely on Medicare beneficiaries in the Original Medicare program, not on Medicare Advantage participants.

 

CMS Dashboard Provides Comprehensive Data to Improve Decision-making

 

“The ultimate hope is to deliver better health care across the country,” says Weinstock. And toward that end the new CMS dashboard actually shortcuts the process of compiling the data from over 40 million Medicare hospital admissions beginning as far back as January 2006. The data will continue to be updated monthly.

 

The firm that developed the CMS dashboard, MicroStrategy, is a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software. The company suggests that their dashboards are well-suited for the CMS because they are able to display large volumes of information that provide Medicare beneficiaries with the ability to see how their tax dollars are spent.

 

 

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