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 »
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 »
President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Bill will not work. It is based on decreases in physician reimbursement while forcing physicians to increase overhead with unaffordable electronic medical records. More and more physician groups and practices are starting to realize that they cannot make a living from the reimbursement from Medicare. They are quitting taking new Medicare patients and trying to get rid of the old ones by not taking assignment.
President Obama’s idea is to force physicians to be more efficient producers. It is very difficult to force anyone to do anything they cannot afford. Read more »
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 »
Much of the debate about the health reform has been on whether or not it will lead to government-run health care. But the fact is that the government’s share of health care spending already is growing at a faster rate than private spending, a trend accelerated by the recent economic recession.
A new report from Medicare’s actuaries, published in the journal Health Affairs, found that “Federal government spending for health services and supplies increased 10.4 percent in 2008 . . . and accounted for almost 36 percent of federal receipts, up considerably from 28 percent in 2007. By comparison, spending for health care by private businesses grew just 1.2 percent in 2008, in part because of a drop in the proportion of employer-sponsored insurance premiums paid for by employers” while “health care spending by households grew 4.3 percent in 2008, a deceleration from 5.9 percent growth in 2007” but still more than the adjusted personal income growth of 2.7%.
The current economic recession, the authors say, had two major impacts on health spending: 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 
