Surgery is expensive, there are no doubts about that. However, there are a few things a patient without insurance who desires surgery can do to minimize the costs as much as possible. Before going into cost-cutting measures, you first need to understand where the costs come from.
In rank order, the costs of surgery come from (highest to lowest):
How to minimize the costs of surgery
As I was getting my daily fix of ESPN recently, something a bit different than the routine scores and highlights came across my TV.
Two very talented men, both potentially bound for NFL stardom, were showcasing their talents for scouts, coaches, recruiters, and reporters – a panel of judges if you will. Although these players have certainly proved their talents in the past, these workouts will likely determine which player an …
What the physician hiring process can learn from the NFL draft
by J. Walden Retan MD
Begin with what everyone knows. Healthcare costs and health insurance costs are climbing more than twice as fast as the cost of living, and have been for years. There is no need for numbers to prove the point. Just ask anyone who buys health insurance on their own, any employer trying to take care of his employees, any employee whose wages …
Vermont’s version of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)
With the expected cutbacks in healthcare funding and the increasingly dismal outlook for “new” money in the healthcare pot, “value” has quickly become a key watchword.
In the past decade, we’ve seen many public and private payers implement value-based, pay-for-performance (P4P) programs as a means of spurring healthcare providers to improve the quality of services they provide and, tangentially, reduce the …
Will paying for outcomes improve healthcare quality and efficiency?
Comparative effectiveness research — investigations that determine which treatments are best — has attracted attention in the health care debate. Critics charge that these studies are designed to restrict choice. The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest released a report that suggested that they would stifle innovation. Often they are framed as studies to support efforts to keep useful but expensive …
Niaspan and how comparative effectiveness research was done well
Have you noticed the recent trend against specialty physicians? Policy experts have determined that primary care needs incentives to attract medical students away from those “highly lucrative” specialties such as plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery, interventional cardiology, and neurosurgery.
Our federal government believes in equal opportunity — if you wish to become a family doctor. There are incentives sponsored …
Health reform’s prejudice against specialist physicians
Everybody has a theory of what’s wrong with American health care and why costs are high.
I have my own theory – talk is cheap. By this, I mean Americans and third party payers are unwilling to pay more for what mere talk is worth.
They do not want to pay more for a visit to the family doctor, …
Why cognitive doctors need to be paid more
8,000 patients will no longer be able to receive care from UNC Hospitals and their affiliated physician practices because of a dispute between UNC and the insurance company Aetna.
The bottom line is that Aetna does not want to pay as much for care provided by UNC as UNC wants to be paid for providing this care. No surprise there, as the interests of the two parties (health care provider and …
How a dispute with an insurance company can affect patients
Ok, I confess. I have contributed to the $2.3 trillion that our country spends on health care every year. As a patient I want the best possible care for my family and me. As a physician I am the gatekeeper to expensive procedures, medications, and diagnostic tests. However, by several indices including life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and satisfaction with the health care system, we are not getting our money’s …
How primary care physicians can improve health and lower costs
Part two of the three-part series, Let’s Pay Popular People More!
Take a moment to ask yourself whether any of these categories describe you or someone you love:
If any of these terms describes you or a loved one, then you are statistically more likely to give a doctor a lower Read more…
How paying doctors for patient satisfaction is racist
In recent weeks, headline news has been reporting on the battle to curb the federal debt. What does this have to do with medical professionalism?
The federal government must borrow forty cents of every dollar it spends. In health care, it needs to borrow from China and other lenders to reimburse doctors, hospitals and other providers who bill federal programs.
The government’s debt totals $14.3 trillion. It is …
What medical professionalism has to do with the federal debt
Medical school should be free.
That’s an argument made by physicians Peter B. Bach and Robert Kocher in the New York Times.
This isn’t a new concept. I’ve discussed whether medical school should be free for students who choose primary care. And, for some in the country, it’s already happening. Like at Case Western Reserve University, for instance. The Cleveland Clinic …
Would free medical school be enough to save primary care?
My first exposure to KevinMD.com is reading Healthcare costs can be reduced with emerging business models by Joe Flower.
While I am not informed about the medical business models to which he refers, I am experienced in business. I hail from a family of doctors and hospital owners. While I did lose touch with the industry for several years, I have noted several changes which do not make sense. …
The evolution of hospitals and the present state of health policy
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The cost curve of American medicine continues to bend up. That is unsustainable. It must begin to bend downward.
Two recent headlines focus the problem:
New York Times, May 14, 2011: Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care
And, CNN Money, May 11, 2011 reports “Your family’s healthcare costs $19,393.” That is for a family of four, which has a median income of $75,700 — before taxes.
Opportunity …
Can ACOs reinvent the American health care system?
I’m a big game theory guy.
I think you can explain the actions of the participants in any structured activity or enterprise by looking at the rules of the game. When you look backwards in time you discover that the “players” almost always made choices that represented rational self-interest. This is especially true in games played using zero sum rules: someone wins only if someone else loses. How the game is …
Medical malpractice tort reform equals healthcare reform
Doctors who do not successfully e-prescribe 10 times for Medicare patients in the first six months of 2011 using claims-based reporting may be hit with a 1% penalty on their Medicare Part B payments for covered professional services in 2012.
The penalty will increase to 1.5% in 2013 for those who don’t e-prescribe for 25 Medicare patients during 2011.
Not yet e-prescribing?
Maybe your Read more…
E-prescribe now, or risk a Medicare penalty
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
by John Tooker, MD, MBA, MACP
On March 31, 2011, CMS issued a proposed rule to implement a section of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires the HHS Secretary to establish a Medicare Shared Savings Program. Under the proposed rule, eligible providers and …
ACP: How accountable care is a team sport
Part one of the three-part series, Let’s Pay Popular People More!
My patient only had 20 minutes to wait for the van headed to detox. The people who had worked to get him into a detox program already numbered in the double digits. Sam (not his real name) was the classic public inebriate — he woke on sidewalks with the shakes, vomited blood on a regular basis, had lost most of …
How basing physician pay on popularity marginalizes some patients
There’s an underlying tension between physicians and health policy experts.
Health policy experts take subtle jibes against physicians in their analyses, with many feeling American doctors are overpaid, which exacerbates health costs. They tend to be politically progressive, and generally dismiss the issues that most doctors care deeply about. Medical malpractice, tort reform and the cost of medical education, for instance.
And …
The tension between physicians and health policy experts
The insurance middleman has taken a toll on the family doctor. New practice models plan to change that. Physicians in Seattle, Silicon Valley and Boston are proving what the rest of the world already knows. When you have a high function primary care system, there’s less money spent and better health outcomes.
Before House, M.D., …
Direct primary care and the Marcus Welby vision of primary care
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