CMS finalizes the TAVR coverage rewrite, heart team survives

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CMS finalizes the TAVR coverage rewrite, heart team survives

Plus: Two hospitals, 1,300 miles apart, end labor and delivery the same night. The day's rules, money, and enforcement, sourced and tiered below.

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This week's Service Line roundup starts with cardiology: CMS closed a nine-month fight over its Medicare coverage rule for TAVR, the catheter-based heart valve replacement, shifting the volume floor onto individual doctors.

The rewritten coverage rule drops the evidence registry for the sickest patients and sets a 20-procedures-a-year operator floor (15+ TAVR) now that hospitals lost their own separate volume minimum.

Record

A bankrupt Missouri hospital and a Fortune 500 hospital chain's Nevada facility will both stop delivering babies on the exact same night this month, for completely opposite reasons.

Fitzgibbon Hospital (Marshall, MO) sold itself out of bankruptcy and ends labor and delivery Sept 30. Henderson Hospital (Las Vegas, owned by UHS) ends maternity and NICU care the same night, trading beds for ER capacity.

Also today

CMS publishes the Part D "reasonable and relevant" contract terms RFI Read
Merck restricts 340B covered entities to one contract pharmacy starting Oct 1 Read
Texas Medicaid system lost track of postpartum coverage, OIG audit finds Read
Cardiology and women's health hit the same Medicare comment deadline Read

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