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Merry Christmas From Riverbender Radio's The Bridge: Now Playing Christmas Music

2 years 6 months ago
ALTON - Riverbender Radio's The Bridge will be playing your favorite Christmas music and classic carols around the clock beginning today, Dec. 19 at 3 p.m. through Christmas Day. David Ollenbittle, station manager of Riverbender Radio, and Christmas enthusiast said he hopes the switch over to Christmas music helps to get people into the spirit of the season. “We’ll take care of the music so you can focus on taking care of the presents and food, and the things that really matter like spending time with family and friends,” Ollenbittle said. This is The Bridge station's second year providing special Christmas programming. Ollenbittle will kick off The Bridge station's festivities with The Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey. Then through the weekend, you can expect to hear popular songs White Christmas by Bing Crosby, Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree by Brenda Lee, A Holly Jolly Christmas by Burl Ives, Jingle Bells by Frank Sinatra, Here Comes Santa Claus, an

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Congress and Industry Leaders Call for Crackdown on Hospice Fraud

2 years 6 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Less than three weeks after ProPublica and the New Yorker published an exposé of hospice fraud, members of Congress have called on the Department of Health and Human Services to “immediately investigate this situation.”

In a letter sent Friday to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of Inspector General, the bipartisan leaders of the Comprehensive Care Caucus wrote that “Medicare fraud cannot be tolerated, especially when it is being perpetrated on our nation’s most vulnerable patients.”

The ProPublica-New Yorker investigation described how the lucrative design of the Medicare benefit incentivizes many profit-seeking hospices to cut corners on care and target patients who are not actually dying. It chronicled the lack of regulation and the frustrated efforts of whistleblowers to hold end-of-life care conglomerates accountable. And it drew on state and federal data to reveal how, in the absence of oversight, the number of for-profit hospice providers in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada has lately exploded.

The letter’s signatories — Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis. — decried the “troubling trend” spotlighted by the reporting and requested a briefing from the agencies within two weeks about plans to “address the proliferation of fraudulent hospice providers.”

The story’s findings are also being cited by lawmakers and lobbyists in New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul is considering signing legislation to outlaw the creation of new for-profit hospice providers in the state. At the moment, all but two of New York’s 41 hospices are nonprofit. Assemblyman Richard Gottfried introduced a bill, which passed this summer, to keep things that way. “We can close the barn door before the horses have gotten out,” he said. “The article raised the level of awareness around issues with for-profit care.”

Published last month, the investigation provoked what industry leaders have called a “much-needed” conversation on how Americans die — along with demands to improve those deaths. “The abuses detailed in the article call for a reform of the Medicare hospice benefit that can reduce the opportunities for fraud and abuse,” the National Partnership for Healthcare and Hospice Innovation, a group for nonprofits, said in a statement. In public letters, LeadingAge, another association for nonprofit providers, and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, an organization for hospice professionals, separately emphasized that “change is needed.”

Lobbying groups whose members include for-profit providers — the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the National Association for Home Care & Hospice — took issue with the investigation’s focus on “bad actors” but said in a joint statement that its members look forward to working with lawmakers “to implement solutions to address the isolated problems highlighted by the article without jeopardizing access to the Medicare hospice benefit.”

Dr. Ira Byock, a palliative care physician, author and former president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, echoed the calls for greater monitoring of the hospice system in the wake of the investigation. “Hospice in America is gravely ill,” Dr. Byock wrote in an op-ed published last week by STAT, the health care news site. “I am hopeful that the article will spark a long-overdue internal reckoning by the field — my field — and the industry we gave rise to.”

Hospice began more than 60 years ago as a countercultural charity movement to help patients die with comfort, support and as little pain as possible. After the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan authorized Medicare to cover the service, dying became a big business. In 2000, less than a third of all hospices were for-profit. Today, more than 70% are. Between 2011 and 2019, the number of hospices owned by private equity firms tripled. For profit-seeking providers, hospice is lucrative: Medicare pays a fixed rate per patient a day, regardless of how much help is offered. The aggregate Medicare margins of for-profit providers hover around 20% compared with just 5% for nonprofits.

Studies have found that for-profit hospices are more likely than their nonprofit counterparts to have less skilled staff, reduced clinical services and fewer home visits in the last days of life. Their patients have longer stays and leave hospice alive at higher rates. Last year, citing the research, three members of the Senate Finance Committee requested information on the quality of hospice services provided by Kindred at Home, the country’s largest home care chain. (Kindred’s hospice subsidiary was recently spun-off and sold to a private equity firm.) “We are concerned that when applied to hospice care, the private equity model of generating profit on a rapid turnaround can occur at the expense of dying patients and their families,” they wrote. Analysis of the data is ongoing, senate staffers said.

Assemblyman Gottfried said that the pending legislation in New York is an attempt to prevent the profiteering that’s unfolded elsewhere from seizing his home state. Jeanne Chirico, who heads the Hospice and Palliative Care Association of New York State, said that her group regularly fields calls from venture capitalists looking to break into the market. So do her members. Mary Crosby, the CEO of East End Hospice, a nonprofit located on Long Island, said that once or twice a month investors make offers. “We’re a particularly attractive acquisition target because we struggle financially and we’re not linked to a larger health care system,” Crosby told me. “But if you’re actually providing the kind of interdisciplinary care that is based on the original hospice mission, as we are right now, you’re not going to be making a lot of money.” Her hospice covers around 20% of its operating costs from donations, she said.

New York would not be the first state to bear down on its hospice sector. California has enacted a temporary ban on new hospice licenses, after the Los Angeles Times uncovered a dramatic increase in hospices that far outpaced the demand for services. In a report released this spring, state auditors found that since 2015 the Department of Public Health had never suspended a hospice license and had revoked a license only once. “The state’s weak controls have created the opportunity for large-scale fraud and abuse,” they said.

ProPublica and the New Yorker’s reporting outlined how California’s pattern of disproportionate growth is spreading to other states. In Arizona, Nevada and Texas, the rise in new Medicare-approved hospices since 2018 now accounts for around half of all hospices in each state. Unlike New York, these states don’t have “certificate of need” requirements for hospices, which means there’s no strict limit to the number of providers that can open in a given area.

The simplest way to understand the recent hospice boom is to see it.

Rapid Rise in Hospices Concentrated in West and Southwest

A ProPublica analysis of Medicare data reveals a sharp uptick in providers since 2018.

(Source: <a href="https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/topics/hospice-care">CMS data set of Medicare-certified hospices.</a> Chart by Lena Groeger.)

This chart represents Medicare hospices — it does not include the dizzying rise in state licenses — and therefore undercounts the total explosion in end-of-life care providers. (Hospices must first obtain a state license before they can be certified to bill Medicare for their services.) Federal data, for instance, shows just 22 Medicare-certified hospices packed into a building on Friar Street in Los Angeles, but California’s data reveals an additional 107 state hospice licenses registered at the same address. (Although California’s moratorium bars new providers, it does not stop the thousand-plus owners already in possession of state licenses from obtaining Medicare certification and billing the government.)

Industry leaders have expressed alarm about the loopholes in the state and federal certification process that enable sudden clusters of for-profit providers to materialize. A ProPublica review of hospice data in Phoenix showed that a raft of new entities shared the same addresses and network of owners. Some of the Arizona entrepreneurs already operate several hospices in Los Angeles, including out of the building on Friar Street. “These small entities aren’t required to publicly report quality of care data, are often not audited and, because of how the per diem is set up, it’s a gold mine,” said Larry Atkins, the chief policy officer of the National Partnership for Healthcare and Hospice Innovation. “You could very quickly figure out whether a hospice is a real place or a mill that’s simply signing up and burning through patients to bill Medicare. But no one is really doing that.”

Eric Rubenstein, who worked as a special agent at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General until 2019, said that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and its contractors are often focused on auditing bigger billers. For the “smaller circuses and clowns,” the government’s lax payment system can be easy to exploit. “The demand for these licenses is predicated on the fact that there’s a huge amount of money to be made quickly in hospice fraud,” he said.

CMS said in a statement to ProPublica that the agency “is aware of the increase in the number of new hospices” requesting Medicare certification, and is “working to ensure they meet all applicable requirements for participation in the Medicare program.”

Last month, four national hospice associations banded together to ask CMS to enact targeted moratoriums in high-growth regions. “In addition to action at the state level, increased federal oversight is needed to protect hospice patients and their families,” they wrote. The groups are currently scheduling a meeting with CMS to discuss their concerns.

by Ava Kofman

St. Louis Could See -35 Degree Wind Chills This Week

2 years 6 months ago
Last week, we gleefully reported that St. Louis could get pounded by 8 inches (the unsexy kind) this week. Weather services predicted a high chance of snow at the time, and our hopes for a white Christmas soared high. Today, we have less exciting news.
Monica Obradovic

The St. Louis Blues And Schnucks Team Up To Deliver Random Acts Of Kindness

2 years 6 months ago
ST. LOUIS - For the second season in a row, the St. Louis Blues and Schnucks have partnered to deliver Random Acts of Kindness throughout the St. Louis area. Blues and Schnucks employees will surprise members of the community, such as restaurant workers, teachers, neighborhood waste service workers, mail carriers, and other individuals who have shown kindness to others, by distributing Blues ticket vouchers over the next few weeks. The program kicked off earlier today when Blues Hall of Famer Bernie Federko, Louie, and members of the Blue Crew surprised shoppers at the Crestwood Schnucks with ticket vouchers to the Blues versus Ottawa Senators game on January 16. "We're looking forward to continuing the Random Acts of Kindness program with the St. Louis Blues where together, we can recognize the kindness shown to us by others," said Bill Bradley, Schnucks Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. "This is an ideal time of year to leverage our partnership and give back to our community.

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Attorney General Raoul Urges U.S. Department Of Transportation To Strengthen Rules For Airline Ticket Refunds And Consumer Protections

2 years 6 months ago
CHICAGO - As travelers nationwide prepare for the busy holiday season, Attorney General Kwame Raoul urges the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to strengthen protections for airline consumers and provide meaningful relief to those whose flights are unexpectedly canceled or significantly delayed. “As families travel during the busy holiday season, delayed and canceled flights waste hours and even days that should be spent with loved ones,” Raoul said. “Any time of year, passengers should be able to count on airlines to get them to their destinations without long delays, unexpected cancelations or spikes in ticket prices. I’m calling on the U.S. Department of Transportation to adopt rules that would ensure airlines provide relief to those who experience cancelations and long delays not related to inclement weather. I will continue to advocate for Illinois consumers to be treated fairly when they fly.” Raoul joined a bipartisan coalition of 34 attorneys

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Tyler Lintker Honored By Edwardsville Rotary Club

2 years 6 months ago
EDWARDSVILLE - The Edwardsville Rotary Club has chosen to honor Edwardsville High School student Tyler Lintke with the Student of the Month Award for the month of December. Tyler was nominated by Honors Spanish teacher Ana Harris of Edwardsville High School. Tyler is the son of Serena and Kevin Lintker. He has won various math awards, along with being recognized in Mu Alpha Theta, a national math honor society. Tyler is involved with many clubs at Edwardsville High School, including Chess Club, Engineering Club, and he is also a member of the EHS Math Team. In the future, Tyler hopes to attend either the University of Wisconsin- Madison, Purdue, or the University of Illinois to obtain a computer science degree. In his free time, Tyler enjoys playing chess, and golf, watching sports, and completing jigsaw puzzles. The Edwardsville Rotary Club recognizes a student each month September through April. Each May, Edwardsville High School staff chooses one of the monthly winners to receive

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Ameren Illinois Partners With Google to Give the Gift of Energy Savings    

2 years 6 months ago
COLLINSVILLE – With a few days remaining on the holiday shopping calendar, Ameren Illinois and Google are joining forces with the Environmental Law and Policy Center to give Ameren Illinois heating customers the gift of energy savings. Customers can get a $0 Google Nest Thermostat, tax and shipping included, thanks to a special Cyber Monday promotion that runs through December 31. Approximately half of a typical residential customer’s utility costs go toward heating and cooling. With a smart thermostat, customers can create a heating and cooling schedule from their smart device that can help them to remain comfortable and save money. “We’re very excited to partner with Google and the Illinois Environmental Law and Policy Center to promote the final days of this very special offer," said Kristol Simms, Sr. Director, Energy Efficiency & Regulatory Policy Implementation, Ameren Illinois. "Smart thermostats can help customers save between 10%-12% on their

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Anheuser-Busch, a 50-foot Christmas tree, and a chance to help The Salvation Army

2 years 6 months ago
You’ll want to see this! Anheuser-Busch and The Salvation Army have had a long partnership together. But this year, they’re taking things a whole new level for The Salvation Army’s 75th Tree of Lights campaign! Head to salarmymidland.org and find out more about the Tree of Lights campaign and how it helps people in need [...]
Luke Davis