(Spirit Lake)– A member of Iowa’s Congressional delegation made a stop today (Mon.) in Spirit Lake.
U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley was involved in a roundtable discussion of healthcare topics at Lakes Regional Healthcare. He says he remains committed to maintaining access to healthcare and keeping hospitals open throughout rural Iowa…
“We have 89 critical access hospitals in Iowa. I visit a few every year, and the concerns are the same. In this particular case, this hospital qualifies for what we call Rural Demonstration programs. You heard the leader here say that was about $2 million for them. And we talked about the needs for more nurses and more doctors, we talked about fraud in healthcare deliveries, particularly in Medicare and Medicaid. Mostly just keeping a very vital need that we have rural healthcare.”
Increasing regulations with Medicare and a wide range of regulations among commercial payers was also a topic…
“I think we’re going to have to pass legislation on this preauthorization. That’s before you can get, do a procedure, or administer maybe some sort of medicine that you have to get approval some place higher up, not within the healthcare but probably within the insurance industry. You know 95 percent of those pre-authorizations are satisfied but it just takes a tremendous amount of time for employees of the hospital and sometimes maybe even a doctor, maybe some other person to do it. Sometimes you get delayed for a long period of time then only maybe 95 percent are approved. So we ought to be concentrating on the five percent that maybe is not necessarily fraud but maybe not as necessary as it should be.”
Pharmacy Benefit Managers and protecting independent pharmacies was also a topic of discussion.
