Many states have passed laws limiting prior authorization. Physicians hate prior authorization and claim insurers and health plans use it to ration care. I tend to be more sympathetic to prior authorization because in an industry where patients are insulated from the cost of their care, there needs to be some checks and balances over unnecessary care and care that is unnecessarily expensive. I often tell the story about the time my wife unknowingly tried to schedule a CT scan at a hospital outpatient clinic near our house.
Category: Single-Payer/Medicare-for-All
Dr. ChatGPT Outperforms Dr. Google
Have you ever consulted Dr. Google? When I first began researching Internet-based medicine 25 years ago everyone was amazed that something like 100 million people per year were searching the Internet for health information. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Internet to learn more about one’s own health conditions. In the early days doctors hated it. Articles appeared in medical journals lamenting all the misinformation patients would encounter and the waste of doctors’ time discussing or refuting what their patients found. Looking back these fears seem ludicrous. Respected health care systems, like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, sponsor websites that provide basic but useful information about health and medicine.
Wednesday Links
- How widespread is the bias against men?
- A Medicare beneficiary with obesity costs $2,018 more than a non-obese beneficiary.
- Study: obesity drugs could save Medicare as much as $100 billion per year.
- NEJM counter study: obesity drugs could cause CMS budget to skyrocket.
- Is Medicare Advantage a bad deal for rural hospitals?
Monday Links
- Study: “we estimate that workers with week-long Covid-19 absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons.”
- Why do academics want to ignore the importance of family structure?
- Mike Kim, owner of Grubb’s Pharmacy in Washington, DC, told STAT News in 2017 that he routinely ships medication for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia to members on Capitol Hill through a contract he has with the Office of the Attending Physician of the United States Congress.
- In 2023, US gross domestic product (GDP) hit $200,000 per household.
- Why so many kids from rich families get into elite colleges.
- A slew of speculations on why Medicare spending has slowed. (NYT)