The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released a 600-page report on problems found in nursing homes. Among the complaints were mediocre quality, too little investment in quality improvement, inadequate staffing levels, poorly trained staff, staff shortages due to low pay and inadequate funding sources. With 77 million Baby Boomers approaching old age, it is likely there will not be enough long-term care facilities to meet their needs. In addition, nursing homes are expensive and unaffordable for most Americans who lack long term care coverage.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
The Worst of Obamacare
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.
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.