- NYU Lagone Health is offering virtual urgent care as an alternative to the emergency room.
- Matt Holt: while primary care is skimping by, hospitals have so much money they are paying their senior people million dollar salaries and starting hedge funds.
- Direct Primary Care: Society of Actuaries study: ER visit are 40% lower.
- Direct Primary Care case study: DPC reduced health plan spending by 54%, employees’ out-of-pocket costs at the point of care by 30%, and employee premiums by 20%.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Saturday Links
- More evidence that genes trump social factors in explaining behavioral outcomes.
- CDC: The new Covid vaccine is 54% effective.
- Len Schaeffer:
The level of variation in our health care system is unbelievable. You could be hospitalized for nine days in New York and for three days in California with the same diagnosis—and those differences would have no impact on outcomes. There is no other industry in the world that uses so many different approaches to the same thing and in which these differences don’t relate to better results. (Article is interesting throughout)
- “Imagine an integrated device that includes an insulin pump, a glucometer, and software that uses photos from a smartphone to carb count your food and dose insulin… The FDA’s regulatory framework is ill-equipped to deal [with this].”
- Is there a relationship between Medicaid expansion and the opioid crisis?
- The US has 36 million Health Savings Accounts, covering 72 million people.
Thursday Links
- First human receives a computer chip implant that interfaces with the brain. (per Elon Musk)
- Canadian Health Minister: Canada will block drug sales to the US if they threaten to impair access for Canadians.
- How can childcare cost more than college?
- Sex matters: “female patients randomly assigned a female doctor rather than a male doctor [under Texas workers compensation] are 5.2 percent more likely to be evaluated as disabled and receive 8.6 percent more subsequent cash benefits on average.”
- If you are ever reincarnated, don’t come back as a crab-eating macaque. They are used for toxicology testing in the biomedical industry.
Rural Hospitals are Suffering, as are Their Patients
The medical news website, Kaiser Health News ran an article about a rural hospital in Oklahoma suing its patients over unpaid bills. This is now an old, familiar story in health care. Hospitals, including nonprofit organizations, sometimes sue patients for delinquent medical debts. Obamacare was supposed to do away with medical debt but many people still have cost-sharing they cannot afford.