- Primary care physicians providing a higher proportion of telehealth visits cared for more Black, Hispanic, dual-eligible, and medically complex patients.
- To make telehealth access permanent for Medicare patients, let the rate be lower than the rate for in-office visits.
- Mobility: More than three out of four Americans (76.8%) will be in the top 20% by income for at least one year between ages 26 to 60, and about one out of three will be there for ten years or more!
- “We show how fraud is driven by a combination of inadequate (expected) penalties for fraud and imperfect reimbursement rates.”
Category: Telemedicine
Would You See a Hologram Doctor?
Telemedicine is a way to see a doctor remotely. As an aside, I wonder if the people complaining that they are just as productive working remotely from home are the same ones who only want to see a doctor in person. Just a thought. In any case telemedicine has several small problems. Talking to a doctor on the phone is impersonal. Taking over Zoom allows you to see a face but not much else. Seeing a hologram is different.
NYT: Poor Not Benefiting from Teletherapy for Mental Health
Public health advocates and advocates for the poor seem prone to view the glass as half empty rather than half full. This is about teletherapy. Therapy over the phone was supposed to expand access to mental health care to needy people but so far that hasn’t happened, experts say. Online therapy is booming, but the poor and needy don’t seem to use it.
Thursday Links
- Trudeau’s legacy: Canada’s per capita income has fallen to below 70% of what it is in the U.S.
- Do hospital mergers damage local economies and result in an increase in deaths by suicide and drug overdoses? Maybe not.
- Telemedicine under Medicare gets a 3-month extension.
- Each year, 120,000 die from snake bites and about 400,000 lose limbs to amputation.
- Study: Sugary drinks were linked to 2.2 million additional cases of Type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease in 2020, with a disproportionate share of those cases concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
- Wastewater, even after treatment to make it drinkable, contains high levels of forever chemicals.
- Evolution of Part D plans over a decade: more prior authorization and step therapy requirements