Monday Briefing: Trump CMS Pick Faces Another Vote

Happy Monday! To get your mind warmed up after a chilly weekend and get a jump-start on your week, take a minute to review the hottest news around the industry.

To start, President Trump’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will see a second voting round with The Senate Finance Committee, after voting last week ended in a tie. Seema Verma, CEO of health policy consulting firm SVC Inc., will face a second formal vote before her nomination passes to a final vote in Congress.

Here’s what we covered last week on Home Health Care News:

After only a few years in operation, HomeHero, a California-based home care startup, announced it had ceased operations. HomeHero’s CEO Kyle Hill cited a challenging regulatory environment and a marketplace that is unlikely to be disrupted by technology in a lengthy blog post about the company’s decisions to close up shop.

We also took a look at the home health jobs that are the top earners, on average. A survey conducted by Hospital & Healthcare Compensation Service (HCS) ranked the highest paid positions.

On the home health side of things, one of the nation’s largest providers, Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Amedisys (Nasdaq: AMED), announced it was acquiring six home health and hospice centers from Tenet Healthcare (NYSE: THC). The announcement came as Amedisys revealed its end-of-year earnings for 2016, which beat analysts’ expectations on earnings per share.

Around the Web

The need for caregivers is expected to continue growing rapidly, but there’s a big gender gap in how these roles are filled. Specifically, men are not taking caregiving and nursing jobs, Harvard Business Review wrote. Part of the problem is low pay and the stigma that caregiving and entry-level healthcare jobs are “women’s work.”

The best states for health care were also ranked, with Hawaii saying “aloha” to the top spot, according to U.S. News. The states were ranked based on three benchmarks: access to care; quality of care and the overall health of the population.

Written by Amy Baxter