Time Magazine discovered that seeing the doctor can be a real pain in the caboose. You aren’t feeling well so you call your doctor’s office. They tell you the next available appointment slot is several weeks away. You wait three weeks and finally present at the doctors’ office, where you wait in a “waiting room” while filling out a mountain of paperwork your doctor should already have. You are led to an exam room where you wait some more. You finally see your physician, whose face is buried in a computer screen. Ten minutes later you’re summarily dismissed and told to get lab work that has been ordered for you. A month later you get the bills (plural). Your appointment lasted only 10 minutes, but your budget will feel the sting for weeks to come. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
Category: Telemedicine
Wednesday Links
- “The crackdown on [opioid] pain pills replaced legally manufactured, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy black-market products of unknown provenance and composition. Meanwhile, prohibition fostered the rise of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute.”
- Jeffrey Singer testified with the same message. He was the Democrats’ witness!
- Telemedicine is being widely used in Ukraine.
- Paragon: In 2019, New York (state per capita income: $67,366) received $17,145 in federal Medicaid funding per person in poverty, while Alabama (state per capita income: $43,288) received $6,148.
- CBO’s options for reducing health care spending: establishing caps on federal spending for Medicaid; limiting state taxes on providers; reducing the federal Medicaid match rates; increasing Medicare Part B premiums; reducing Medicare Advantage benchmarks; and reducing the tax subsidies for employment-based insurance, etc. What about a free market for health care?
WSJ: Remote Mental Health Counseling Suffers from Growing Pains
The Wall Street Journal ran an article on The Failed Promise of Online Mental-Health Treatment (gated on one device but I was able to read it for free on another). During the pandemic lockdown there were few options available for counseling at a time when many peoples’ mental health was taking a hit.
A Hospital Stay (but in Your Own Home)
Years ago, I worked in a long-term acute care hospital. We employed social workers whose job was discharge planning. They charted out where to move patients once they had been treated by our hospital. This process was started before patients were admitted. Patients with no clear path to move elsewhere were not admitted. Our average length of stay was in excess of 30 days. At that time our type of facility was PPS exempt and cost reimbursed based on a TEFRA limit (see p. 71 for more information).