Ambulance NB is not free if you are from out-of-province
Before Christmas I was visiting in New Brunswick and needed an ambulance for a midnight trip to the hospital.
My heart almost did a flip when a $650 bill for ambulance services came a month later.
If I had been traveling in a province that didn’t have reciprocal medicare coverage, the bill could have been more than $10,000. Continue reading
Significant gaps in the decades-old database came to light earlier this year when ProPublica found that many states hadn’t been reporting disciplinary actions taken against doctors, nurses, therapists and other health practitioners as required.
But the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency that’s part of the Department of Health and Human Services, essentially undermined its own department’s efforts to manage and maintain the federal database.
The new investigation was conducted by the department’s inspector general. It found that CMS, which oversees health care programs serving about 45 million Medicare beneficiaries and 59 million Medicaid beneficiaries, took disciplinary action against numerous bad medical providers but did not report those actionsto the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank. Continue reading
