A few years back a Johns Hopkins University study on emergency room prices found they were outrageous. I mean, who knew that hospital emergency departments overcharge? The study looked at 12,000 billing records for emergency medicine doctors nationwide. Researchers found patients were charged 340 percent more, on average, than what Medicare pays for the same service. Charges ranged from 1 to nearly 13 times what Medicare’s fee schedule.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Yale: Low-Income Medical Students Under-Represented in MD/PhD Programs
Researchers at Yale University did a study of prospective students applying to MD/PhD programs. It found (as if this is news) that these programs do not attract a wide diversity of students, especially from lower-income backgrounds.
Between 2014 and 2019, applicants from families with higher household incomes were accepted at increasingly higher rates, a trend not found among other income brackets.
Yale researchers lament the lack of diversity in MD PhD programs, which is decreasing slightly.
Wednesday Links
- Kaiser does a deep dive into doctors billing for email.
- Of eight states that have not recovered job losses for Covid, seven are blue.
- Joe Biden’s budget: like the original (2020) budget, this one would lower output and worker wages. Also the $400,000 threshold (below which no taxes) is not indexed—so eventually the Biden taxes will reach everyone on the income ladder.
- Biden’s budget v. the House Republican budget.
- A completely bureaucratic view of when patient preferences should be honored.
- Claude 3 Opus Fails Steve Landsburg’s Economics Exam.
Another Example of How Hospitals Employing Physicians Harms Patients
In the game of who can gouge patients and employer health plans more, hospital systems are mailing their physician employees’ patients ominous news, hoping to force insurers to pay more for services. Your physicians likely do not share in any higher fees, although you may have higher cost sharing for their services. I have yet to get such an email or letter in the mail, but I have read several articles over the years when various Dallas-area hospital systems talk to the media about dropping BlueCross of Texas or something similar.