I often warn patients to avoid the emergency room (ER) at all costs – mostly because it will cost you a fortune. I also advise patients to avoid hospitals in general unless they are too sick to go anywhere else. Hospitals are the most expensive place to have medical care done that can be done elsewhere. It turns out, the ER is not just dangerous for patients financially, but also a dangerous place to work.
Category: Health Reform
Bad Deal: Hospitals Discover Concierge Medicine
I just read about a troubling trend: Hospital-owned concierge medical practices. This is where hospitals establish a concierge practice for the purpose of attracting a few hundred wealthy members (I mean patients) willing to pay $2,000 to $4,000 apiece to be able to get quick access to their physician.
Tuesday Links
- Food stamp households spend a disproportionate share of their food budget on unhealthy items, such as sugary beverages and prepared desserts. And it’s worse than other low-income households who don’t have food stamps.
- Social Security tells Kotlikoff the number of Social Security clawback letters per year is probably closer to 3 million. (It started at 1M in a congressional hearing; then jumped to 2M in answer to a FOIA request by KFF; and now it’s at 3M. (No telling what the real answer is.)
- Less than half of the benefit of Obamacare subsides goes to the newly insured. One-third of it is wasted.
- In 2023, 79 percent of (Obamacare) enrollees received subsidies (up from 44 percent in 2015), at an average cost of $20,739 per enrollee gaining coverage.
Monday Links
- “We find that one-quarter of food-insecure households fall within the top three quintiles of the income distribution and that food-insecure households spend about as much as food-secure households do on food per week.”
- Biden lowers the hammer on short-term insurance: plans can only last 3 months with a 1 month renewal.
- This year alone, the federal government will spend more than $1.1 trillion to fund more than 130 anti-poverty programs. State and local governments will kick in an additional $700 billion, pushing total anti-poverty spending to more than $1.8 trillion. If all that money were given to the poor it would equal $47,493 per person.
- Bob Moffett authors another review of Modernizing Medicare.
- There have been 70 legal changes to Obamacare so far.