The Wall Street Journal reports that facility fees are becoming increasingly prevalent in the U.S. health care system. In some cases, a facility fee for using a physician employed by a hospital nearly triples the cost of seeing a physician.
Category: Medicare
Saturday Links
- The U.S. is no longer among the top 20 happiest countries.
- Saving lives with pig kidneys.
- Why is fetal tissue research so controversial?
- Liberating the pharmacists.
- Highest drug price ever: $4.25 million per treatment.
- Site neutrality (same fee regardless of where the procedure is performed) would save Medicare more than $3.7 billion over the next decade, and lower beneficiary co-payments by $40 a visit.
The Good and the Bad of Medicaid Long Term Care Estate Recovery
I went to stay with an old friend and his family for the 4th of July holiday weekend a few years ago. The house next door was a little overgrown because my friends’ neighbor had gone into a nursing home. A year or so later I was back visiting for the weekend when the neighbor’s son was moving into the house after his father died. I heard a similar story with a neighbor of mine, when both parents spent time in a nursing home before they died. When the last parent died their only asset was a house, which was later sold, and the proceeds split among their offspring. In both cases I wondered why the state was in the business of protecting inheritances for families who turned to Medicaid for their parents’ long-term care.
Saturday Links
- What a ransomware cyberattack is doing to the heath care system.
- Almost every government intervention in response to Covid was wrong.
- Biden’s budget: no plan for Social Security.
- Canadian health minister: You have a duty not to purchase private care: “Going and paying your way out of your circumstances creates a terrible malady for our system.”
- After the collapse of cost-plus financing, private payers began to pay the same way Medicare pays.