The medical news website, Kaiser Health News ran an article about a rural hospital in Oklahoma suing its patients over unpaid bills. This is now an old, familiar story in health care. Hospitals, including nonprofit organizations, sometimes sue patients for delinquent medical debts. Obamacare was supposed to do away with medical debt but many people still have cost-sharing they cannot afford.
Category: Health Reform
Record-Breaking 2024 Open Enrollment Period Under the Affordable Care Act
21.3 million Americans with high (and likely unaffordable) deductibles and narrow access to doctors and drugs. The vast majority of whom are having their premiums paid, in whole or in part, by taxpayers. It’s worth pointing out that many of the new enrollees are likely people who did not enroll when the premium was 2-4% of their income but do when coverage is given to them for free. The data below does not yet have 2024 (breakdown by income has not been released yet), but I’d bet the trend holds.
Wednesday Links
- Hospital patients do better if they brush their teeth.
- Florida’s plan to import drugs from Canada is limited to state employees. It does not apply to the uninsured or to those with private coverage.
- Google cofounder Larry Page once accused Tesla CEO Elon Musk of being a “specieist,” who preferred humans over future digital life forms.
- More on whether AI will take over and kill all the humans.
- More evidence that bureaucracy is no substitute for real markets: “There was no evidence of a differential change in thirty-day mortality among all Medicare beneficiaries with targeted conditions at high-proportion Black hospitals versus other hospitals seven years after the implementation of the [Value Based Purchasing] Program.”
The Corporate Practice of Medicine and a Physician Cartel is a Bad Combination for Patients
Physician licensure has created a cartel. There I said it and I said it out loud. The right to practice medicine has high barriers to entry, both in terms of high standards and high costs. It takes 7-to-11 years beyond college to train a new physician, but it really begins long before medical school.