This is interesting.. I am a caregiver to my very disabled mother 30 years (stroke).. I have kept her alive by attempting to micro-manage healthcare workers even though I have no formal healthcare education. She is 80% "traditional Medicare" “fee for service”/ 20% "State Medicaid" by design by me. No way and not at anytime in the last 30 years would I hand her care over to a nursing home or manage care home (I always thought they were scams). Once you hand over control than getting the best care from the best universities then becomes impossible. With technology today, we don't need nursing homes but (((they))) have done everything in their power to keep us years behind and to make life extending therapies impossible to find and access. With some out of the box thinking and some of the silicon valley dollars wasted on useless apps put towards caregiving, taking care of our elderly could be so much easier and nicer for everyone involved.
I love how Trump and his admin are allocating out the first $30 billion in Emergency grants for Hospitals and doctors.. The money is allocated based on Medicare dollars spent last year. So states like Minnesota which is the best state in the country for Elders and Health care will get the most help. This just confirms my beliefs all along and I hope that this money starts to deprogram our doctors and start working on extending life instead of shortening it. Not the doctors fault, the system was designed this way so that they have no choice.
Based on my own experience, states like Michigan have tried every trick thought of to passively enroll seniors into cheaper Medicaid Homes forcing seniors to give-up the very luxury and life extending options of Medicare. They will be penalized.
Maybe this is why Michigan as an outlier has so many covid cases. Below are 2 Michigan charts I threw together. Check out the dates. As the numbers for the flu were falling off the cliff the numbers for Covid were rising.
From the article:
"Migoya and executives at other beleaguered systems are blasting the government’s decision to take a one-size-fits-all approach to distributing the first $30 billion in emergency grants. HHS confirmed Friday it would give hospitals and doctors money according to their historical share of revenue from the Medicare program for seniors — not according to their coronavirus burden."
"Issuing the funds based on Medicare revenue “allowed us to make initial payments to providers as quickly as possible,” an HHS spokesperson said Friday. Some of the money was expected to go out as soon as Friday in electronic deposits."
Even the type of Medicare payments hospitals typically receive will give some systems a much bigger share of the $30 billion than others of the same size.
HHS is basing the payments on traditional “fee for service” Medicare revenue. But hospitals with a big chunk of managed care Medicare business, called Medicare Advantage, won’t be credited for that.
In Florida, more than four Medicare members out of every 10 are in Medicare Advantage plans, one of the highest portions in the country, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
In New York, 39% of beneficiaries are in Medicare Advantage. In Montana, by contrast, the figure is 17%. In Wyoming, it’s 3%."
https://khn.org/news/furor-erupts-billions-going-to-hospitals-based-on-medicare-billings-not-covid-19/