I began my career in health care as a staff accountant for a nonprofit hospital. At the time the prices didn’t seem that outrageous. Prices were high, but not seize your house to pay for a hangnail high. How times have changed.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Update on the British NHS
All is not well:
- The waiting list for hospital-based procedures stands at 7.2 million—about 12 percent of the population
- In mid-2022, 42.7 percent of all patients were forced to wait more than four hours before they received any care.
- Compared to 2019, outpatient appointments are down 13.8 percent.
- Official measures of mortality indicate that the NHS’s shortcomings are contributing to higher-than-normal death rates, with perhaps as many as 500 “excess” deaths occurring every week.
Why a Telephone Consult is Billed as a Hospital Visit
I have often told the story about the time my wife unknowingly tried to schedule a CT scan at a nearby hospital outpatient department. As luck would have it, prior authorization is all that saved us from a huge bill, of which her share was going to be $2,700. I quickly found a free-standing radiology clinic that had a contract with Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Texas for $403. Oddly enough, BCBS was willing to approve a scan at either facility. Nobody called her to explain the huge mistake she was about to make by getting a diagnostic scan at a hospital-owned facility. Here is the thing: Health insurers, Medicare and Medicaid pay hospitals higher prices for the same services that are available elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. Neither do payers alert patients that cheaper alternatives exist.
Why Physicians in Training are Joining a Union
Physician residency is a training program required in all 50 states before medical school graduates are allowed to practice medicine. Residency programs last from three to seven years depending on the specialty. Medical residencies are apprenticeships, where recent medical school graduates care for hospital patients under the direct and indirect supervision of senior doctors who train them.