Weekend update

The House and the Senate are taking a recess for the Fourth of July holiday this week.

Before the recess last week, Congress passed a transportation authorization bill (H.R. 4348) that among other things authorizes OPM to implement a phased retirement program for federal employees (Sec. 100121). As the Federal Times explains, the provision, once implemented, will allow employees to ease into retirement over a period of months or even years, while transitioning their workload to younger employees. The new program evidently will not affect FEHB coverage because the FEHBlog sees no reference to the FEHBP in the provision. There will be some interesting bounces of the ball though, e.g., when an over age 65 employee engaged in a phased in retirement be considered retired for purposes of coordination of benefits with Medicare? The required OPM regulations (and perhaps the existing CMS regulations) may help answer that question. This is likely to be a popular program.

The FEHBlog likes to give credit where credit due, and for that reason he suggests reading this Cleveland Plain Dealer article about a Cleveland Clinic effort to better manage the care offered to its chronically ill patients. The facility is pilot testing three different coordinated care models in an effort to settle on one approach to use with a Medicare accountable care organization.  "The three new pilots will expand what Hopkins [one Cleveland Clinic location] has been doing to a much larger scale, measuring all 33 of the quality metrics outlined in the ACO regulations, and using larger teams, including newly trained "chronic-care coordinators," nurses who will follow medically complex patients."