What's Your Bad Debt Policy?

Bad debt and charity...seems reasonably easy to differentiate the two. Many hospitals that I come into contact are confused when they are trying to report expenses related to these two categories. The Healthcare Financial Management Association is providing guidance on this issue. Their statement is as follows:

"The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) have clearly stated that charity care results from an entity's decision to forego revenue. Bad debts, on the other hand, result from the patient's nonpayment for services that have met the criteria for revenue recognition."

What it all costs

I stumbled across a very interesting website today. Understanding USA is website to celebrate a visual demonstration of questions and answers leading to understanding. I clicked around on it and there is information about health and the cost of health care. The text is a little small so be sure to check out the site. Maybe this will come in useful during a presentation.

Google Health

Some may be aware that Google has been working on a project to help consumers organize their health information. They call this venture Google Health and is slotted for debut sometime in 2008. It will be interesting to see how a company with the vast resources of Google is able to make inroads in the healthcare community. Kudos to the people at Google Blogoscoped for the updates they have on this project and all things Google for that matter

One of my favorite books

While this may not have much to do with healthcare, I thought I would recommend one of my favorite books that has helped my career. The book is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. This book helped me think about how I set my goals for myself and for the organization that I work for. Enjoy!

Medicare Primer

The Kaiser Family Foundation has published a helpful pamphlet for those of us that need a refresher on how Medicare works.

The Attack on Non-Profits

I previously had written on the attack on healthcare with the movie "Sicko" by Michael Moore. Mr. Moore is merely a director who's goal is to shock the public into buying tickets. Healthcare is now up against a more formidable foe, the federal government. The Internal Revenue Service is introducing drastic changes to the way that hospitals must file their taxes. The new form 990 is going to require hospitals to describe the charity that they give to warrant their charitable status. Until now, hospitals have had to do one of three things to prove their worthiness.

1. Maintain an Emergency Room and keep it open regardless of patient's ability to pay

2. Subsidize or give free care to patients

3. Provide an unmet need to the community

Hospitals are being challenged about their tax-exempt status. Executive teams and boards will need to review these new rules to make sure they do not put themselves at risk.

It Just Makes Me Sicko

I'm going to attempt to bring together two of the articles that I read today:

The first was an article by the McKinsey Quarterly, which I must say is a must read for all health care professionals. It gives a great overview of business as a whole and ideas can be taken from the articles about other industries and related to health care. Anyways the article was titled, "Ten Trends to Watch in 2006." Not very current, but useful all the same. Of particular interest to me was trend #6, the role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny. This trend didn't take a great amount of foresight, but it is beginning to take hold of the health care industry.

Which leads me to the second article I read today on the Alan Katz Health Care Reform Blog. This article discussed the new documentary by director Michael Moore titled, Sicko. Mr. Moore's goal is "to eliminate private, profit-making health-insurance companies." Mr. Katz discusses in several postings about how Mr. Moore's film is created to mislead the public into thinking that a single-payer system is the solution to the U.S. health care problem.

I have written before about the need for members of the community to come together to help improve the health care system as a whole. It is my opinion that big business and insurance companies are not "bad", and don't need to be attacked in any manner. Health care workers need to fight this label that is being put on them that they are only interested in profits and care nothing for the people. Mr. Moore's work does allow for the discussion to take place on a larger scale, but it is destructive in a manner that brings us farther from a solution.