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5500 Preparer's Manual for 2012 Plan Years
The premier resource in the field of Form 5500 preparation, 5500 Preparer's Manual will help you handle the required annual Form 5500 filings for both pension benefits and welfare benefit plans.
from Spencer’s Benefits Reports: On April 29, the Senate Finance Committee discussed a number of policy options for reducing costs and improving quality in the health care delivery system.
According to committee chairmen Max Baucus (Mont.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) (the senior Republican on the committee), other policy options for increasing health care coverage and financing health care reform will be released after the roundtable discussions on those topics. A committee meeting on expanding health care coverage is scheduled for May 5. Sens. Baucus and Grassley have indicated that the Finance Committee will finish working on comprehensive health care reform legislation as early as June.
Policy Options
The Finance Committee’s policy options for reducing costs and improving the health care delivery system concentrate on the Medicare system and include the following:
Promoting quality care—The policy options would shift Medicare from volume-based purchasing to value-based purchasing. Under value-based purchasing, Medicare would provide new payment incentives for care that contributes to positive patient outcomes.
The policy options would establish a value-based purchasing program for hospitals starting in fiscal year 2012; would provide primary care practitioners and targeted general surgeons with a Medicare payment bonus of at least 5% for five years; and would provide Medicare payment to primary care practices that provide specific transitional care services for beneficiaries with high-cost, chronic illnesses.
Fostering care coordination and provider collaboration—To encourage chronic care management, the policy options would allow broad-scale Medicare pilot programs of patient-centered care coordination models for the chronically ill that improve quality and reduce spending. The pilot programs would allow preliminary rapid-cycle Medicare testing of evidence-based care management and coordination models across various settings to determine best models for success.
The options also would provide Medicare payment incentives to hospitals that reduce preventable hospital readmissions, provide a single bundled Medicare payment for acute and post-acute episodes of care; allow high-quality providers to share in savings that they achieve for the Medicare program through increased collaboration; and expand Medicare participation in community-level health care delivery system reforms.
Medicare Advantage: promoting quality, efficiency, and care management—Policy options would use current measures to pay plans for quality improvement, change statutory benchmarks or set benchmarks based on competitive plan bids, provide a bonus payment to Medicare Advantage plans that use evidence-based programs to manage care of the chronically ill, and allow plans to continue to offer extra benefits, but reduce wide variation among plans.
For more information, visit http://finance.senate.gov/press/Bpress/2009press/prb042809.pdf.
Senators Push Public Plan Option
On the same day that the Finance Committee was meeting, 16 senators sent a letter to Mr. Baucus and Sen. Edward Kennedy (Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions urging the two chairmen to include a public plan option as a “core component” of health care reform. The April 29 letter notes that “there is no reason to believe that private insurers alone will meet the public purpose of ensuring coverage for all Americans at an affordable price for taxpayers.”
Senators who signed the letter include Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Carl Levin (Mich.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.),Jack Reed (R.I.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Bob Casey (Pa.), Jim Webb (Va.), Ted Kaufman (Del.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), and Charles Schumer (N.Y.)
A copy of the letter is at http://brown.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter.pdf.
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