A dozen years ago my wife had a minor service performed at a hospital outpatient clinic. The hospital business office told her the service was covered by her health plan. Months later a man called claiming he worked for the hospital and requested payment of more than $700. This was news to my wife, who asked for an invoice. He wouldn’t provide one. My wife refused to pay without an invoice explaining what she was paying for. Another person called again weeks later, but he too would not provide an invoice. She was willing to pay but needed a list of denied charges to contact her health plan. She never got one and the hospital also never got paid. They stopped calling.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Tuesday Links
- Florida doctor accused of fatally removing the wrong organ from a patient has license suspended.
- The average chief executive in a publicly traded health care company earned $11 million. The median was $4.1 million. (StatNews)
- Nonprofit hospitals avoided paying $37.4 billion in taxes in 2021.
- The penalty for not signing up for Medicare drug coverage: Those not enrolling in a Part D or Medicare Advantage plan or entering these programs after they are initially offered at age 65 pay an additional monthly “drug coverage premium” penalty equal to the monthly cost of the plan in perpetuity. That is a big financial stick!
Saturday Links
- Out of more than 50 alternative payment models (APM) that CMS has implemented only six have shown statistically significant cost savings.
- Chronic diseases cause 75% of all global deaths.
- A liberal admits Trump was right about vaping.
- The pros and cons of noncompete clauses for physicians.
- Why decriminalization can lead to lower drug use.
- How deregulation is needed to allow US medical innovation to go forward.
Friday Links
- The Risky Research Review Act would put guard rails around the ability of scientists to engage in gain of function research.
- Paragon has 12 reforms to federal healthcare spending that would curb spending by $2.1 trillion over 10 years.
- Two ways to boost the supply of transplantable organs.
- AEI on the need for legalizing the market for human organs.
- An unintended consequence of EOTC: when the credit is more generous, single adult daughters work more and spend less time on caregiving for their elderly parents. I am not against including care giving as a social useful activity under the EITC. I am against giving away money with no strings attached at all.
- US brand drugs sell for about three times what people pay in other countries; but US generics are one-third less than the prices abroad.
- Patients who think they are communicating with their doctors through MyChart could unknowingly be linking to a AI program called Art. If unedited by a human, Art’s responses risk serious harm about 7% of the time. (NYT)