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: Direct Primary Care
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.
Tuesday Links
- How big a problem are counterfeit drugs?
- Republicans don’t like Biden’s new budget.
- Biden gaffes: “We added more to the national debt than any president in American history.” And “Send me to Congress.”
- Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands allow doctors to commit [euthanasia], so have become as permissive as realistically possible.
More Physicians Messaging Patients by Email (and Billing for it)
Probably around 50 years after telephones made their arrived in doctors’ offices physicians stopped using them to communicate with patients. The reason was because health insurance enrollment was growing and third-party payers were not willing to reimburse for phone consultations, while few doctors wanted to work for free. That has been changing over the past few years (the former, not the latter).