Hurray, It's the Weekend

I don't have to suffer with the Redskins until Monday night. Bloomberg has a good story on where Congress stands with the efforts to create health care reform bills for floor consideration. Also this week in Congress, the FY 2010 defense authorization bill was approved. As reported in the Federal Times and mentioned earlier in the FEHBlog, that bill includes a bevy of federal retirement benefit changes.

Govexec.com reports that OPM has extended until February 15, 2010, the window for making Federal Long Term Care Insurance changes.

Yesterday, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) issued a report on 2008 HEDIS results for health plans. HEDIS measures the success of health plan efforts to improve health care quality for their members. NCQA found that " the quality of U.S. health care was virtually stagnant in 2008, a disturbing slowdown after a decade of improvements. The across-the-board trend was seen in care provided to people with private insurance coverage as well as in Medicare and Medicaid." There were a few bright spots, "such as keeping heart attack patients on life-saving beta blocker drugs and delivering flu shots. But there were disquieting declines in several measures related to mental health, diabetes care, the overuse of imaging for low back pain and breast cancer screening."