Healthcare Dive reports on today’s Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on its bipartisan bill to lower healthcare costs. The FEHBlog understands that the next step will be the release of a revised bill.

Health Payer Intelligence informs us about America’s Health Insurance Plans’ Congressional testimony last week criticizing vertical healthcare provider mergers.  AHIP’s “statement emphasizes that one major cause of rising health care costs is vertical provider consolidation—when more and more of a region’s doctors and medical experts work for the same hospital or health system. We highlight research findings showing that when health systems in a region get bigger and squeeze out competition, prices go up for consumers.” Of course, as Health Payer Intelligence points out, the provider associations make similar claims about payer consolidation. In the FEHBlog’s view, there’s no doubt that the Affordable Care Act gave tremendous momentum to provider and payer consolidations.

The Government Accountability Office made public a report on OPM’s retirement application processing delays. On page 7 there’s a chart breaking down the following statistic given in the report:

31.6 percent of federal employees who were on board as of September 30, 2017, will be eligible to retire in the next 5 years. Some agencies have particularly high levels of employees eligible to retire in the next 5 years.

The federal Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research released an updated report on the frequency and associate cost of hospital readmissions occurring within 30 days of discharge. The following bullets caught the FEHBlog’s eye:

• In 2016, blood diseases had the highest readmission rate (25.3 percent), followed by neoplasms (17.9 percent). Pregnancy/childbirth had the lowest readmission rate (3.6 percent).
• The average cost of readmission was higher than the average cost of the index admission for two-thirds of the types of principal diagnoses.