Texas is the latest state to consider licensing assistant physicians / associate physicians to treat patients within the state. These are not to be confused with physician assistants. The former titles are medical school graduates who have not matched to a residency program. The Texas House Bill is 2556.
Category: Devon Herrick
‘Pass-Through Billing’ Health Care Scams
Nearly three years ago I wrote about rural hospital lab scams. That’s when a shady marketing consultant working with scammers convinces struggling rural hospitals that they have a solution for precarious hospital finances. Basically, every lab test ordered by affiliated physicians is billed through a rural hospital with a more lucrative lab contract. The hospital makes money for doing nothing, while the marketing guys get a big, fat cut of the proceeds. You and I pay higher prices as a result.
Why We Need an FDA
I often criticize the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for being stodgy, slow to react and overly risk averse. However, the agency has an important purpose. The forerunner of the FDA dates back to the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. At the time unscrupulous food manufacturers would use red dye to make spoiled beef appear fresh and used formaldehyde as a preservative to make foods last longer. Only a few years prior, Heroin was considered a wonder drug, as a treatment for morphine addiction and as a cough suppressant. Morphine was also once used as an elixir for teething pain in babies.
Are Food Stamps Healthy?
In 1996 Bill Clinton signed the law ending welfare as we know it. This quote was written 20 years later in 2016:
More than 13 million people received cash assistance from the government in 1995, before the law was passed. Today, just 3 million do.
“Simply put, welfare reform worked because we all worked together,” Bill Clinton, who signed into law welfare reform, or the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times in 2006. Clinton had campaigned on a pledge to “end welfare as we know it” and today it is all too apparent that he succeeded.
I tend to disagree with the last sentence.