Healthcare, Senior Living, Economics
Nurses, particularly RNs, and their role and work in health care is a subject of deep interest to me. My wife is a nurse, our daughter is a nurse, my mom was a nurse, and so was my aunt. One could say nursing and nurses (RNs in particular) “run in the family”. I have written … Read more
I’ve been rather busy lately and my wife’s side of the practice (compliance, litigation), very much so. Suffice to say, as the two prime partners and owners of H2 healthcare, we work collaboratively and support each other. In other words, her “busy” is mine too and vice-versa. So today, I’m setting aside for catch-up and … Read more
I like tapas from time to time, especially for a happy hour gathering. Thursday seems to always be a good day to have little bites of something prior to a big weekend; even better if Friday is a short day or a day off into the weekend. In a post earlier this week I mentioned … Read more
The COVID pandemic illustrated a whole bunch of flaws, holes, and gaps within the U.S. health care system. To be fair, the pandemic illustrated flaws, holes, and gaps within U.S. society, government, the economy, etc. A trend that has been slowly moving forward seems to be accelerating through and post the pandemic and that trend … Read more
For early August, this is a semi-busy week with health policy stuff and upcoming econ data on inflation. Congress is on recess but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a fair amount of activity in-play that will impact the health care industry, some positive, some negative. Likewise, this is the start of the presidential election … Read more
SNFs got a little early Christmas present yesterday when CMS announced its Final Rule (PPS) for Fiscal Year 2024 (begins October 1, 2023). Instead of a 3.7% increase as proposed in the initial rule, CMS finalized a 4% increase (plus an additional 0.3%). Back in April, I wrote about the proposed rule. That post is … Read more
Last Thursday, Senators Bob Casey (Pennsylvania), Ron Wyden (Oregon), and Chucky Grassley (Iowa) sent a letter to CMS asking that the agency “take immediate steps to strengthen the nursing home oversight system”. Their letter is a follow-up to a report from the Senate Committee on Aging, chaired by Casey, detailing a myriad of problems with … Read more
Yesterday, the second quarter GDP report (economic activity) was released. This is the initial print from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It will see two more prints but the initial one is always the headline story. Revisions of late, tend to be down versus up (improvement). I eschew the headlines for the details as the … Read more
I’ve been closely watching the post-pandemic recovery of the senior care and living industries. In the past sixty days or so, I’ve written a number of articles/posts on occupancy recovery, factors impacting recovery, and factors that may further stress recovery trends. Within these posts/articles, reference material exists from sources like Fitch, National Investment Center … Read more
Last month, CMS dropped the 2024 PPS Proposed Rule for Home Health. Like all other provider segments, Proposed Rules function to address primarily payment, then other programmatic issues/rules such as quality measures, data reporting, etc. The proposals generally mirror the final rules, but tweaks do occur. The payment end, however, rarely changes much as often, … Read more