From fiscal years 2009 through 2016, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) obligated more than $9 billion for the provision of inmate health care and several factors affected these costs. Obligations for health care rose from $978 million in fiscal year 2009 to $1.34 billion in fiscal year 2016, an increase of about 37 percent. On a per capita basis, and adjusting for inflation, health care obligations ros

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has taken action to partially meet two of the five criteria GAO uses to assess removal from the High-Risk List (leadership commitment and an action plan), but it has not met the other three (agency capacity, monitoring efforts, and demonstrated progress). Specifically, VA officials have taken leadership actions such as establishing a task force, working gro

GAO found that two areas accounted for the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) fiscal year 2015 projected funding gap of $2.75 billion. (1) Higher-than-expected obligations for VA's longstanding care in the community (CIC) programs--which allow veterans to obtain care from non-VA providers--accounted for $2.34 billion or 85 percent of VA's projected funding gap. VA officials expected that the Ve

Vertical consolidation is a financial arrangement that occurs when a hospital acquires a physician practice and/or hires physicians to work as salaried employees. The number of vertically consolidated hospitals and physicians increased from 2007 through 2013. Specifically, the number of vertically consolidated hospitals increased from about 1,400 to 1,700, while the number of vertically consolida

The Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Veterans Affairs (VA), and Defense (DOD) administer programs that include preventive health activities such as health screenings and education campaigns, but the departments reported that they do not track department-wide spending on these activities. Departments reported that determining such spending is challenging because these activities can

About half of the respondents to our questionnaire reported some information on the effect of an intervention on both quality of care and costs--the two types of data needed to determine whether or to what extent a particular intervention enhanced the value of health care. Overall, the vast majority of our respondents reported at least some information on the observed effect of the intervention o

Based on GAO analysis of Medicare cost reports submitted by FQHCs in 2007, Medicare payments to most FQHCs were less than FQHCs' submitted costs of services. About 72 percent of FQHCs had costs per visit that exceeded the upper payment limits. However, FQHCs varied greatly in their costs per visit, with FQHCs with the highest costs per visit having relatively fewer Medicare visits than FQHCs with

In June 2008, GAO reported that its case-study analysis of unbilled patient services at 18 medical centers, including 10 medical centers with low billing performance and 8 medical centers under VA's Consolidated Patient Account Centers (CPAC) initiative considered to be high performers, found documentation, coding, and billing errors and inadequate management oversight that resulted in unbilled a

The lack of timely and accurate information reporting by grantees has delayed HRSA's distribution of certain grants and has placed at risk HRSA's ability to obligate these funds. The late submission of actual unobligated balances for the 2007 grant year delayed HRSA's ability to determine grantees' unobligated balances and redistribute these funds to other grantees. A number of grantees were late

Our review found articles that measured the extent of concentration in private health insurance markets or focused on the relationship between competition in these markets and other variables, though the findings of these studies should be interpreted with caution. Several articles identified through our review examined the extent of concentration in private health insurance markets, though this