Everyone probably knows what brown bagging is. That’s when you pack a sandwich in a brown paper bag and take it to work rather than joining your spendthrift colleagues, when they go out for lunch or order takeout. Sometimes it saves you the time of going out to eat but mostly it saves you the expense of a meal prepared by a restaurant. A sandwich, an apple and a container of yogurt that costs you less than $2 to pack at home substitutes for a $12 takeout meal. In the hospital industry the practice of brown bagging is called white bagging. That is when your insurance company refuses to pay the hospital’s 600% markup for costly oncology drugs and has them delivered to the hospital for patients’ infusions (or patient picks them up at the specialty pharmacy)
Author: Devon Herrick
Should Doctors Tell You You’re Fat and What to Eat?
I’ve heard people criticize doctors for not counseling their patients more about the benefits of diet and exercise. Yet, I’m not convinced most patients don’t already know they’re out of shape. After all, the patients in question are the ones who buy their clothing and perhaps comprehend their clothing sizes are double-digit numbers. I’ve asked a doctor I know if he ever has to just be blunt with a patient. He said yes, belatedly telling one patient, “you didn’t get this way overnight.”
Medical Care Credit Cards Benefit Patients and Providers
My wife’s former hair stylist was an immigrant struggling with the loss of income after the Covid lockdown. One day the stylist explained she needed eye surgery she could not afford. My wife told her about CareCredit, a company that provides consumer credit for medical care and veterinary care. The next time they met the stylist thanked her. She had scheduled her eye surgery after getting approved by CareCredit. The stylist said she would have up to a year to pay off her surgery interest free.
The anecdote may sound like a story with a happy ending but not according to Senator Elizabeth Warren and some of her Democratic colleagues.
Update on Amazon’s Health Care Initiative: A Mixed Bag, Both Convenient and Convoluted
A reporter for Health Care News emailed me asking about Amazon’s health care initiative so I decided to take another look. Earlier this year I wrote about Amazon entering the health care space. One Medical is its membership-based medical service. One Medical features virtual clinical visits along with 125+ physical locations in 25 cities. It claims to break the mold for…