Prices in health care are often difficult to obtain and meaningless when you obtain them. There is not one price but dozens of prices depending on who the payer is. There are different prices for Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealth. There is the pricemaster (list) price that almost nobody pays. The chargemaster price is often the official cash price if you lack insurance coverage and don’t inquire prior to care. Then there is the cash price if you negotiate in advance of care, which is often lower than the list price. If you were to inquire about the price, assuming you were told a price at all, you would likely be given the pricemaster charge for a specific billing code without information about which billing codes belong together. You see, a knee surgery isn’t one code, it’s numerous codes so hospitals can bill for numerous services.
Category: Devon Herrick
Walmart to Double its Primary Care Business to 75 Clinics
There is a Walmart about a mile from my house. Inside my Walmart is a pharmacy and Quest Diagnostics. I’ve used both at various times. A Walmart a few miles away has a low-cost veterinary clinic that I’ve used as well. Another location near me has an optometrist on site.
Indiana Bill Would Allow Associate Physicians in Underserved Areas Work
The state of Indiana has a bill before the Legislature (SB 400) that would allow medical graduates who have not matched to a residency to practice under licensed physicians. This is important because more than 10,000 medical graduates fail to match to a residency program each year. Many of those will try again the following year but many will ultimately never complete a residency program. In most states medical graduates who never complete a residency will never have an opportunity to care for patients.
Would You See an AI Doctor?
The term artificial intelligence (AI) has been in use for many years. Indeed, it includes many names, such as AI, neural networks, machine learning and a few other buzzwords. The preceding linked article from IBM tries to explain the meaning of all these terms. A few years ago, IBM made headlines as the developer of Watson, which famously competed on the game show Jeopardy, beating Ken Jennings. There is a new AI interface on the Internet that anyone can try out called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a language-based AI chatbot that can do many things humans can do, including correcting computer code, writing college entrance essays and a host of other things.