- Shared Uber rides are back. But is anyone using them?
- Medical debt actually fell during the pandemic – across all income groups.
- Medicare Advantage plans cost $1,704 less per member, per year, relative to traditional Medicare.
- Paying employees $1,000 each to get vaccinated induces 98% compliance.
- Did Covid cause an increase in prejudice against East Asians and Hispanics?
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Make Sure that “Free” Obamacare Health Screening is Actually Free
Yet another article on making sure your “free” health screenings under Obamacare are actually free. When something is as convoluted and bureaucratic as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) there are bound to be problems. Since late 2010, when this provision of the ACA took effect, many patients have paid nothing when they undergo routine mammograms, get one of more than a dozen vaccines, receive birth control, or are screened for other conditions, including diabetes, colon cancer, depression, and sexually transmitted diseases. That can translate to big savings, especially when many of these tests can cost thousands of dollars.
Why Did the FDA Authorize Vaccines for Toddlers?
[W]e don’t know if the vaccines are safe and effective. The rushed FDA action was based on extremely weak evidence. It’s one thing to show regulatory flexibility during an emergency. But for children, Covid isn’t an emergency. The FDA bent its standards to an unusual degree and brushed aside troubling evidence that warrants more investigation….
Only 209 kids between 6 months and 4 years old have died from Covid—about 0.02% of all virus deaths in the U.S. About half as many toddlers were hospitalized with Covid between October 2020 and September 2021 as were hospitalized with the flu during the previous winter. More children were hospitalized during the Omicron wave last winter, but hospitalization rates were still roughly in line with the 2019-20 flu season. None of the 5,400 or so toddlers in Moderna’s trial were hospitalized for Covid. Yet at least 15 were hospitalized for non-Covid infections.
What Doctors are Doing, and Why
Is the practice of medicine being dictated by billing codes?
Several decades ago … physicians wrote “notes” on their patients…. every patient had a chart, and physicians would make notes following each patient encounter, capturing such elements as past medical history, the story of the present illness, the findings of physical examination and laboratory testing, and plans for further diagnostic evaluation and care. This approach required the physician to think everything through and formulate a coherent plan. In a sense, every physician was a storyteller, and one of the signs of excellence was the ability to formulate a succinct but comprehensive and coherent account of the patient’s care.
Today, by contrast, a great deal of the medical record is composed by selecting items from lists of available choices and drop-down menus…. And in most cases, the lists of options are constructed as much or more for coding and billing purposes—making sure the practice or hospital complies with regulations and gets paid—as they are to foster good patient care.