When Covid first began to spread it was difficult for patients to obtain Covid tests without going to an emergency room. When tests first became widely available there were drive-through testing centers with lines that snaked for blocks. When my wife began to feel ill in January of 2021, I made her an appointment for a Covid test at a Walmart Neighborhood Market pharmacy. The soonest appointment available was eight days away. We pulled up to the drive-through window and a pharmacy technician gave us the sealed swab and instructed my wife how to use it. My wife sealed it in the appropriate bag and deposited it in an adjacent laboratory collection box outside the drive-through. The results were relayed to us by phone a day or two later.
Author: Devon Herrick
Family Caregiving an Underrated Benefit of Remote Work
Covid changed everything. It has been three years since a mysterious virus began spreading around the globe and throughout the United States. From March of 2020 through August of that same year aggressive measures were put in place by the CDC to prevent the spread of Covid. As the pandemic took hold, lockdowns began. Non-essential businesses closed and there were strict criteria determining which could remain open while all others were shuttered. Schools and daycares closed, kids sheltered at home and did schoolwork over zoom.
Addicted to Drug Money: States Not Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Addiction Treatment
In was the dawn of the 21st Century when untreated pain became a public health priority. In 1990 Dr. Mitchel Max, then president of the American Pain Society, authored an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine lamenting the lack of progress treating pain over the previous two decades. Within a few years Joint Commission jumped on the bandwagon and published Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign. Thus began America’s experiment in aggressive pain treatment and its descent into opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
Meet Your New Primary Care Physician: MegaCorp
Large corporations are buying primary care physicians’ practices in droves. CVS bought Oak Street, while Amazon bought One Medical. Primary care is rather mundane as physicians’ practices go. So why are hospitals, insurers and pharmacy chains scooping up primary care practices?
The appeal is simple: Despite their lowly status, primary care doctors oversee vast numbers of patients, who bring business and profits to a hospital system, a health insurer or a pharmacy outfit eyeing expansion.
And there’s an added lure: The growing privatization of Medicare, the federal health insurance program for older Americans, means that more than half its 60 million beneficiaries have signed up for policies with private insurers under the Medicare Advantage program. The federal government is now paying those insurers $400 billion a year.