A couple of recent news stories reminded me of the dirty little secret about healthcare that no one wants to talk about, the proverbial elephant in the room. All those pills, surgeries, x-rays, medical care? It costs money!
Yes, Virginia, quality medical is not a right, not guaranteed in the Constitution, not something good-hearted corporations and companies, whether for-profit or not, are obliged to hand out like candy corn at Halloween. It costs money. Billions of dollars a day.
This appears to be something we all forgot in the warm fuzzy moments of watching military transport planes fly critically ill people out of Haiti to Florida hospitals. Who was going to pay for all this medical care? For the months of hospitalizations and rehabilitation these people were going to require? When the state of Florida, rightly so, asked the same question, prompting the halting of those military convoys, it ended up on the receiving end of a world-wide outpouring of boos and hisses. Read more »
I am very blessed. The hospital where I practice, while concerned with patient satisfaction, does not worship at its altar. That is, so far our administrators seem to understand that people will occasionally be angry or unsatisfied, and that such dissatisfaction is within the realm of real life. We still have people storm out of the emergency department, prattling on about lawyers and lawsuits, promising to go to another hospital in the future (which we heartily encourage). On the whole, we do a bang-up job of keeping the right people happy, and an adequate job of making the right people unhappy. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
Why aren’t Americans in the streets, demanding reform of a health care system that is providing inadequate care for millions, wildly inefficient, and gradually bankrupting our country? A major reason: proponents of reform have lost control over the message because people think it’s too complicated to understand. Confused about important details of the proposals, the public is susceptible to misrepresentations by opponents. Read more »
It’s the fastest growing “specialty” service in medicine: hospitalist medicine. These are the doctors who limit their practice to the care and management of patients admitted to the hospital. It has been wildly popular because it adds a shift-like work schedule to medical care for physicians while supposedly preserving their personal life. It also moves patients through the hospital faster, shortening length of stays. As one of our more esteemed hospitalist bloggers likes to boast: it’s a “WIN-WIN!”
At least until the hospitalist service gets too busy. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
A study published in this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine looked at so-called errors made in consultation code billing by specialists seeing patients at the request of a primary care practice in suburban Chicago. The methodology? Comparing the primary care office referral form with the specialist’s bill.
The author concludes that specialists are greatly overusing consultation codes in situations where a new patient visit would be more appropriate, to the tune of over half a billion dollars a year in Medicare payments, and suggests that it is time to reconsider the use of these codes. (Medicare, of course, has already come to the same conclusion, and beginning January 1 of this year, is no longer paying for consultation codes.)
There may be misuse of consultation codes going on, but this study does not necessarily prove that. The methodology does not include medical record review, the standard by which coding choices are verified or refuted, and relies entirely on the referring physician’s determination of what the specialist should be billing. Read more »
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A couple of recent news stories reminded me of the dirty little secret about healthcare that no one wants to talk about, the proverbial elephant in the room. All those pills, surgeries, x-rays, medical care? It costs money! 
A study published in this week’s 
