Ever since Obamacare became law, my colleagues and I have been writing about a race to the bottom in the exchanges – where health plans try to attract the healthy and avoid the sick. The result: people with serious health problems are being denied access to the doctors and hospitals they desperately need.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Is your doctor gaslighting you? Or just too busy to talk?
Medical gaslighting is the term used when patients feel their doctors dismiss their symptoms as minor or psychosomatic. Women complain doctors are prone to blame symptoms on such things as weight and mental health. Women presenting with symptoms of heart disease are twice as likely to have their medical condition dismissed as mental illness than men with similar symptoms.
Pro-Patient, Pro-Family, Pro-Free-Enterprise Health Reform
Two years ago, 81 think tanks and grass roots organizations signed onto Health Care Choices, a comprehensive reform of the health care system. This was a huge accomplishment – since the conservative think tanks had been at odds over health policy for almost three decades. At 45 pages and 139 footnotes, however, it was very wonkish and not a useful campaign document. No one campaigned on it in 2020.
To be useful in an election, a plan needs to be marketed – and that’s why Marie Fishpaw (Heritage Foundation) and I pulled out 10 key benefits that candidates could promise voters. We got input from Newt Gingrich, key people on Capitol Hill and others. They are briefly explained at this Goodman Institute Brief Analysis and discussed in the April issue of Health Care News.
The most important innovation in our approach is this: We should begin by saying Obamacare has made health insurance unaffordable and the best doctors and hospitals inaccessible. In other words, we should go right to the heart of what the other side promised and didn’t deliver; and then pledge to do what they didn’t do by empowering individuals and letting markets work.
Further Proof of Growth in Surprise Out-of-Network Balance Billing
Dominique Vervoort and Ge Bai analyzed the percentage change in average charges and compared them to average Medicare Part B (fee-for-service) payments for 51 specialties. Data was drawn from the years 2010 to 2019, with the figures adjusted for inflation. The authors found a positive association between the change in charges and change in Medicare payments (see the figure). This was not unexpected. Charges are often pegged to Medicare in some way. There were two outliers. (This too should come as no surprise). Emergency care and anesthesia charges grew faster and were above the trend line.