I cracked a Budweiser and flipped on Spotify radio for what I was told would be a challenge. On my computer screen, Minnesota’s health insurance exchange website waited expectantly, to which I submitted the Holy Trinity of health information — age, date of birth, and tobacco usage — and waited. The next page loaded slowly, evidence of the voluminous information that would soon surface. I had hoped for simplicity, instead, …
The federal government is currently debating whether the big six health insurance companies in the U.S. will soon become the big four. Aetna and Humana have announced plans to merge, as have Anthem and Cigna. The American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association strongly oppose the mergers, saying they will reduce competition in consumer markets.
Meanwhile, health care provider groups continue to consolidate. Small hospitals either get swallowed up by …
When was it that we stopped respecting ourselves and our profession? When did we decide that quietly smoldering or complaining to one another is better than standing up as a single entity for what we know is right? How did we allow misconceptions and distrust of physicians to grow? For outside forces to dictate what is best for our patients and take …
Pharmaceutical drugs cost too much. The new ones are always so expensive.
Hence, we need more regulations. And, the government should impose them. Set price limits. Cap drugmaker profits. This will make it better for all of us. The paternalism of our government should be the strongest when we are ill. Because we may need that medicine.
The government should regulate things more so we can get it cheaper.
If you didn’t know it left or that someone stole it, I’ll give you a pass. Medicine has been disguised for a long time now. And, when you leave the scene in camouflage, you often go unnoticed.
Medicine is supposed to be the science or practice of diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease. I love medicine. There’s so much to learn. Lots …
Smitty greets Sully as they meet to head to work, “Hey there, Sully! How’s your wife?” Sully answers, “Oh, geez. She’s up in bed with laryngitis.” Then Smitty says, “Laryngitis?! That damned Greek!”
As you may have guessed, I am nursing a case of laryngitis, my voice muted and strained. This time, it has not stopped me from attending to my work responsibilities or other activities. It has required some adjustments though, …
Patients want to receive health care that is of the highest quality. Physicians want to provide it. But what is “high-quality health care?” On that, few agree.
Ask most Americans and they’re unsure where to find it. They know they want to be kept healthy, have rapid access to personalized care whenever they need it and be charged only what they can afford.
Ask the leaders of the national medical and surgical …
“Doctor, the patient is complaining,” said my secretary in a hush-hush voice. “She has been waiting for 30 minutes.”
“She” had an appointment for later in the afternoon but phoned our office about 2 hours before the scheduled time, and requested to come earlier. No emergency. No acute complaints. We always try to accommodate, and pushed to “squeeze” her in. The earlier time, …
He’s loud, brash and audacious. He’s been a celebrity for decades, a well-known businessman and reality TV star. And anyone who is even remotely following the news at the moment knows he’s also dominating headlines with his presidential run. I’m going to pause here to say that I’m not going to get into the politics of anything he has said — no …
Would a single-payer national health program, at the end of the day, truly be sleeker and slimmer than our bloated and fragmented semi-private system? Not according to Dr. Michel Accad, who takes on this important single-payer talking point in his post: “Will single-payer really reduce administrative waste?”
Given that savings from reduced expenditures on billing and overhead are a core argument that single-payer advocates (myself among them) employ to advance …
Anti-Obamacare critics often claim that “every” physician they know hates Obamacare. For instance, pediatric neurosurgeon and GOP Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson told Fox News that “he’s spoken to hundreds of doctors throughout the country about the Affordable Care Act, and not one of them ‘liked’ President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.”
Doctors hate Obamacare, it’s alleged, because it …
Congress is infected with the budget-cutting bug, and building an effective immune system requires political savvy. Sometimes, it’s simple (“We bomb terrorists” or “We process Social Security checks”), but sometimes an agency struggles. Case in point: AHRQ.
In contrast to the expected shortage of tens of thousands of physicians, there appears to be an abundance of health care administrators, at least judging by graph above.
The originators of the graph — economists and physician-activists at Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) — invoke the administrative bloat as reason to promote a single payer system. With a single …
The feminization of health care is fundamentally changing care delivery in the United States and it is doing so in ways that will accelerate the pursuit of improved quality and affordability.
Historically, health care providers and health care leaders have been selected for and nurtured traits that are traditionally seen as “masculine” — traits such as heroism, independence, and competition. Yet it …
In the past, physicians were responsible for both the business and practice of medicine. While administrative personnel played an important and complementary role in practice and hospital management, physicians were the cornerstone. In comparison, today the leadership structure in medicine is now an entirely foreign landscape. Administrators dominate medical practices today and, according to the New York Times, …
Let’s get this straight. I am a penny pincher, who hates waste and wants a lean and efficient government.
But, that said, we have to face the fact that our massive privatization of what once were government functions has been a failure. There are some public services that get really loused up when done privately and for profit.
Manny Alvarez is a 23-year-old college student with the misfortune of having not just a devastating cancer — but the wrong devastating cancer. The chemotherapeutic agents shown to be highly active against his specific tumor cells are FDA approved for the treatment of leukemia, but not for the stunningly rare kind of sarcoma with which Manny has been diagnosed. Nothing is …
California is in the middle of an historic drought, with the government setting limits on how long people can sing in the shower. Farmers in the state may soon need to cut back on planting or production, as ground water dries up. But California is still fruitful ground for testing promising ways to improve how health care consumers, otherwise known as …
Recently, health insurance companies across the nation have petitioned to increase premium rates for customers covered under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) has proposed a 25.7 percent raise in premiums; in New Mexico, BCBS requested a 56.1 percent raise; and, in Georgia, Alliant Health Plans has submitted a proposal for a hike as high as 85 …
Mergers and acquisitions aren’t two words that usually find their way into medical lexicon, but that is rapidly changing. However, health care, like many industries, is experiencing a new round of mergers and acquisitions that is reshaping local and national markets, as well as impacting the availability and affordability of health care services for millions of patients. According to many industry and Wall Street experts, we are on the front …
