Not long ago I interviewed Dr. Todd Sorensen, the CEO of Regional West Medical Center, a 184-bed facility serving a large swath of rural western Nebraska. I’ve known Dr. Sorensen since junior high school, and we’ve kept in touch over the years to discuss the health care system from his perspective as a physician and administrator and mine as a health …
Nearly every day a press release from a health care provider or health care technology vendor shows up in my inbox urging me to look at what they offer and to write about it. Most of the time I don’t find their news worth passing along, but occasionally a pitch sparks a column idea. That’s the case with the press …
A while back I was sitting in a Toronto coffee bar and, as I often do in another country, I began chatting with people about their health care system. One employee taking people’s orders was about to go off duty and sat down to visit. “I’m tired of hearing you Americans talk about rationing in Canada,” he said. “Let me tell you how many MRIs I had when I was …
A friend of mine, a diabetic who has been pretty passive about his medical care, suddenly learned the importance of patient engagement a few weeks ago when a matter affecting his pocketbook grabbed his attention. A bill arrived from Express Scripts, the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) for Emblem Health, a Medigap plan offered to former New York City employees.
For years my friend had been taking the drug gemfibrozil that diabetics …
As we head into health insurance enrollment season, which opens in November, consumers/patients will face yet another challenge in selecting the best health plan. Sorting through policies was tough already, but now insurers are making it even harder by changing the way they will cover generic drugs.
It used to be that opting for generics was a snap. Health plans usually offered three or four tiers of drugs — one for …
American health care has become a gigantic game board with players of all sorts strategizing to win. Winning, of course, means getting more money from payers: government or private. It turns out this medical marketplace game is not all that new. It’s just become wilier, as I have shared in a couple of posts over the summer.
An obituary last week for Dr. Rashi Fein, an influential economist with a …
Just a few years ago it seemed that advocates for health care transparency had scored a big victory. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that they would rate nursing homes by awarding five stars to the best and fewer stars to lower-quality facilities. Families searching for care for loved ones would have access to a familiar rating system to help them make choices. After all, star ratings for …
That the government overpays sellers of Medicare Advantage plans is well known in Beltway circles even if much of the public remains unaware. Recently, two Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) researchers posted new findings on the Medicare and Medicaid Research Review, a peer-reviewed online journal supported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), documenting how some insurance companies are overbilling the government and have been …
I recently wrote about a hospital system in Colorado that had discovered a way to cross market its more profitable emergency room services if a patient first came to its urgent care center. Pretty clever! Then recently I came across another health care marketing trick close to home and just as sly. As I sat on a New York subway one sizzler of a day, an ad for an ice cream …
Not long ago, Tracy Hume, a freelance writer who lives in Greeley, Colorado, sent me an email posing this question: “Do ER-affiliated urgent care providers ever try to escalate patients to the ER when it is not medically necessary?”
It seems that over the July 4th weekend, Tracy’s teenage son was complaining of a headache, nausea and abdominal pain, and was vomiting. He doesn’t complain much, she said, so thinking that …
Beginning with the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) landmark Quality Chasm report in the late 1990s, the health policy establishment, the medical profession and the American public began to hear a new and disconcerting message: American health care was not patient-centered.
The IOM prescribed a number of recommendations to redesign health care delivery, one calling for patients as the source of control over their care. “Patients should …
Are insurance companies making more decisions about the health care you receive? While a decade or two ago utilization nurses working for insurance companies had some power to approve or reject certain treatments, the reach of insurers into the patient-physician relationship is lengthening.
In March, I reported that insurers were sending questionnaires to policyholders newly insured under Obamacare asking about their health conditions and medical needs. And some people were filling them …
I’ve long been a skeptic when it comes to disclosing information about how doctors practice medicine, how hospitals treat patients and what both doctors and hospitals charge for their services. While I am all for transparency, it’s still an open question how patients or consumers of medical care can actually use that stuff to find “the one that’s right for you” or “the best” as marketers like to say.
I’m dropping …
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I am all for transparency when it comes to health care. So when Medicare announced that it would tell the public how much doctors are paid to treat Medicare patients, my first thought was “hooray.” Another victory for consumer information.
Then I began to think about this in more depth. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in response to a ruling in a federal case …
The main purpose of health reform, said the president at a recent press conference, was to provide health insurance to people at affordable rates. He meant the nub of Obamacare — the state shopping exchanges with their smorgasbord of insurance policies — would give coverage to millions of Americans who did not have insurance.
Whether that coverage will be affordable or comprehensive for families remains to be seen. What is crystal …
The specter of loss of choice and freedom to select the doctor you want haunts again. This time it’s being raised on the airwaves with an ad from Americans for Prosperity, a group that advocates limited government and free markets. The ad, an attack on Obamacare, plants doubt in viewers’ minds about whether they can choose their own doctor, a theme that continues to resonate with both the public and …
One could easily make a case that health care is today’s biggest consumer problem—not unlike those that sparked the consumer movement of the 1960s and 70s. Back then, consumer issues centered on problems with using credit, buying cars and home improvement services, and obtaining the best price for food, appliances, and just about every other new-fangled and expensive product that sprang from the post-war economy.
Like many old consumer problems, health …
On a recent trip to Lincoln, NE, I visited Lincoln Industries, a company that makes chrome trims for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. I was curious about the firm’s award-winning wellness program, especially since more employers are penalizing workers by making them pay more for their health insurance if they fail to meet certain health goals.
At the heart of Lincoln Industries’ wellness program is its Platinum Scorecard, which awards points to workers who …
Twelve years ago, in its landmark study Crossing the Quality Chasm, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found that “the health care industry is plagued with overutilization of services, underutilization of services, and errors in health care practice.” In simple English, the IOM reported that health care was riddled with overuse, underuse and misuse of medical services.
The IOM also defined quality health care as “the degree to which health services for …
Maligned over the last decade as places to avoid because of the price of the care they delivered, a study by the RAND Corporation goes a long way toward improving the image of hospital emergency rooms (ERs). The ER price tag was too high for the insurance companies that paid the bills, so many of them tried to discourage ER use by designing policies with high coinsurance and copayments …
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