Rural health care facilities are suffering. They’re closing amid depopulation, where the young leave for college and never return. Left in the community are those with less education and those who have aged out of the workforce. There are also fewer people with private health insurance and more on Medicare or Medicaid. Government health care programs pay less than private insurance and the fees paid by Medicare are often much lower than urban hospitals receive.
Category: Devon Herrick
Adding Insult to Injury: Hospitals Charge for Parking, Irritating Patients and Guests
Stat News ran an article on hospital parking. It’s like adding insult to injury. In addition to patient care, hospitals are also in the business of making money off parking lots. People have no other option than to park their cars in hospital-owned lots when visiting a hospital or the medical office buildings nearby. There is even a Reddit group complaining about hospital parking fees. According to Stat News:
FDA to Decide Whether Covid Boosters Become an Annual Ritual Like Flu Shots
Did you get your flu vaccine this year? How about last year? For me it’s been a few years. As I’ve written before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must decide six months in advance which strains of influenza circulating in Asia are likely to hit North America the following winter. The flu vaccine is a cocktail of four different flu strains designed to combat the strains likely to infect Americans. Sometimes the CDC guesses right, and the United States experiences a mild flu season. In other years a strain that nobody expected somehow becomes dominant and spreads throughout the US and flu is widespread.
Direct Primary Care and other Direct Pay Practice Models on the Rise
An article in the Denver Post claims that more of the city’s physicians are converting their practices to direct primary care (DPC).