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TODAY ON THE BLOG

COVID-19

The Role Of Hospital Infection Control In Flattening The COVID-19 Curve: Lessons From South Korea
By Ron C. Li and Doo Ryeon Chung

The role of hospitals in the fight against COVID-19 must be expanded from treating sick patients to also serving the public health mission of preventing future disease outbreaks. These efforts need to be coordinated at scale to not just flatten the curve but also to keep it flat.
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MEDICAID

Overlap Plans Could Become An Important Option To Promote Continuity Of Care And Contain Health Care Costs During A Recession
By Katherine Hempstead and Joanna Seirup

As Medicaid enrollment grows during the COVID-19 pandemic, overlap plans (plans offering both Marketplace and Medicaid managed care coverage) may play an increasingly important role in advancing continuity of care and containing growth in premium costs in many counties across the country. Read More >>

MEDICARE

Adapting Medicare Advantage Bidding For COVID-19–Related Uncertainty On Claims: A Proposal
By Steven M. Lieberman

Establishing temporary high-cost reinsurance and risk corridors—now available to stand-alone prescription drug plans but not Medicare Advantage (MA) plans—would significantly mitigate risk and limit disruption in the MA market until the impacts of COVID-19 become better understood.
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FOLLOWING THE ACA

Risk Corridors Litigation: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
By Katie Keith

On April 27, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that insurers were entitled to more than $12 billion in unpaid risk corridors payments. One might think that such a resounding decision would close this chapter in Affordable Care Act litigation. But things are rarely so simple with the ACA.
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IN THE JOURNAL

PRIMARY CARE

Medicare’s Care Management Codes Might Not Support Primary Care As Expected
By Sumit D. Agarwal, Michael L. Barnett, Jeffrey Souza, and Bruce E. Landon

To compensate physicians and their practices for activities that occur outside of traditional face-to-face visits, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services introduced two new payment codes to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for services related to transitional care management (TCM) and chronic care management (CCM). Rates of adoption of these codes have been low. To understand the patterns of adoption, Sumit D. Agarwal and coauthors compared characteristics of the practices that billed for these services to those of the practices that did not and determined the extent to which a practice other than the beneficiary’s usual primary care practice billed for the services. Read More >>

A CLOSER LOOK—TRICARE

TRICARE provides health care benefits to nearly two million children of active duty, retired, National Guard, and reserve service members. Child health advocates and congressional reports have raised questions regarding the adequacy of these benefits compared with other sources of children’s health insurance. To help address these questions, Joseph S. Zickafoose, Amanda Lechner, and Thomas Williams compared TRICARE benefits with benefits from Medicaid and Marketplace plans because they represent alternative sources of coverage for many of the families enrolled in TRICARE.

About Health Affairs

Health Affairs is the leading peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of health, health care, and policy. Published monthly by Project HOPE, the journal is available in print and online. Late-breaking content is also found through healthaffairs.org, Health Affairs Today, and Health Affairs Sunday Update.

Project HOPE is a global health and humanitarian relief organization that places power in the hands of local health care workers to save lives across the globe. Project HOPE has published Health Affairs since 1981.

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