Health Reform – Page 239 – The Goodman Institute Health Blog

White House Ends Vaccine Mandates for Federal workers

Posted on May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 by John C. Goodman

Actually, the mandates don’t actually end until “May 11, the same day that the COVID-19 public health emergency ends.”

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity comments:

It was clear by late 2021 that the vaccines had no meaningful effect on transmission, and that prior infection was at least as protective as vaccination. These mandates have been pure drama ever since, and the United States is among the last countries in the world to still impose them. They backfired in many ways-making many millions of Americans suspicious of Big Brother orders requiring the shots.

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AI Chatbot Judged More Empathetic than Physicians

Posted on May 2, 2023October 8, 2024 by Devon Herrick

The human language artificial intelligence ‘chatbot’ ChatGPT scored higher on empathy than its human counterparts in a recent study of medical questions and answers. When compared to human doctors the AI chatbots answers were preferred 80% of the time. The study appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study used questions from Reddit’s AskDocs social media forum. One possible weakness about…

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Why MA Upcoding is a Thing of the Past

Posted on May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 by John C. Goodman

In the past:

When the OIG did audits on fraud for Medicare Advantage for the past several years, the literal definition of fraud in their reviews was to have a code in the RAPS payment system that was not the one in the actual medical record of the patient… [and] they estimated in a couple of reports that the fraud level using that definition … would be as much as 6 percent of the total Medicare Advantage spend.

The fee-for-service Medicare fraud level ranges from 6–7 percent, so the people looking at both numbers said that the plans and the caregivers were in the same ball park….

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Tuesday Links

Posted on May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 by John C. Goodman

George Halvorson: “The death rate for many dual eligible patients [in traditional Medicare] with some conditions runs at about 40 percent, and we know from a year-long study … that the death rate for the people who enrolled in the Medicare Advantage [special needs plans] was 3 percent.”
More from Halvorson on fee-for-service Medicare: “the program has 10,000 billing codes for procedures and not one billing code for a cure.”
Survey: More than 25% of pilots admitted to being untruthful on medical forms — and nearly half turned to nonprofessionals for medical advice versus seeing a doctor.
Under the public health emergency, employers can offer stand-alone telehealth benefits to benefits-ineligible employees like part-time or seasonal workers. Hard to believe employers need the government’s permission to do this.

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