The first is the beginning of recovery for public finances, especially as this is the first budget that shows a drop in deficit and
wage indexes.
The report includes a glossary, color maps, graphs, and appendices on committee membership, meeting agendas, the statistical reliability of federal wage data, proposals for alternative hospital
wage indexes, the reporting form for hospital health care data, and arguments pro and con on a geographic adjustment for physician work.
With this decline has come the abolition of
wage indexes, sliding scales of wages, which allow workers wages to keep up with the rise of prices.
The occupational wage and occupational benefits indexes are in turn constructed from ECI
wage indexes for major occupational groups, each with its weight dependent on the importance of the occupation in hospitals.
SOURCES: Author's tabulations from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Provider Specific Files for fiscal years 1990-1997 and standardized hourly wage data as used in constructing area
wage indexes for fiscal years 1994-2001.
The data are available as
wage indexes and annual rates of change comparing average hourly earnings of men and women in matched establishments between years.
A basic understanding of how the
wage indexes are constructed reconciles much of the discrepancy illustrated in Figure 1.
Column-2 of Table-I contains wage data at current prices while Column-5 contains wage data using 1975-76 average wage; Columns 7 and 8 contain
wage indexes based on Laspeyres and Paasche-type price indexes respectively.
Congress required HHS to ensure that the cost of raising the
wage indexes for these urban hospitals was budget neutral.
They have higher
wage indexes and more discharges than the smaller hospitals, whose
wage indexes are lower.
It gave experience in the collection of data over an extended period in the past, and it provided the basis for measurement of changes in the level of wages through the construction of
wage indexes.
To accomplish this, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) was required to increase the wage index for all affected urban hospitals, and to then calculate a rural floor budget neutrality adjustment (RFBNA) to reduce other
wage indexes in order to maintain the same level of payments.
