Posted on 01/27/2015 8:11:24 AM PST by drypowder
Falls hard and offers a major TBI.
You can be sure that anyone who “uses transformative change to drive strategic vision” is hiding ulterior motives in big words.
Never, ever, be impressed by someone’s vocabulary outside of fiction / poetry. In almost all cases, a large vocabulary is used to hide the truth.
“If they really wanted lower prices, its simple: train more docs.”
Sorry. Not true, although I understand your reasoning. Consider this. For most of the procedures that I do the hospital bills and receives about 20-30 times the fee that I am allowed (and that I often won’t ever see). Physician fees are not the dominant driving force in the cost of medical care. The government is targeting physicians because they want physicians to do less, and thus decrease utilization of the system. Even if you drop physician salaries by 75%, if physicians utilize hospital services, testing, etc. at the same rates as now - and you add more physicians - the cost of medical care will not go down, and may in fact go up.
The only thing they’re worried about is murder during the middle of life (death penalty)
Guess what? Medical costs are about to come way down as the quality of healthcare subsides. Why? Because physicians are about to leave the field in droves. Those who remain will be taking cash under the table. And no matter how much regulation and enforcement there will be it will still become rampant and the government will have kicked itself in the a$$ because it governs the same no matter if it has any experience in a particular field or not. Therein lies a big part of the problem; the administration of the program itself which will become unsustainable as people see no benefit in having it due to the fact that it won’t pay any real benefits with the extremely high deductible and the fact that doctors will no longer accept their paltry payments which aren’t enough to survive on. Guess who is the real beneficiary of this program, huh? Yeah the federal ohliarchial dictatorship. I predict the prgram will implode no matter how high The One ramps up the penalties because people are making far less livable income and will have no other choice.
Killing Medicare to feed Obamacare.
there’s another side to this as well.
The costs associated with running the tests will spike for those who actually get them.
The price of an MRI machine isn’t decreasing. The cost that a hospital incurs for having one is distributed over the number of patients who use it. The more patients that use it, the lower the average cost of doing so, thanks to economies of scale.
Go in the opposite direction, reduce the number of patients who use it, and the per-patient cost will increase. This, in turn, will create additional disincentives for insurance companies to pay for using it.
The natural theoretical progression is to a point where the machine sits unused because no one is willing to pay for using it. Since the hospital takes a bath on a piece of equipment that doesn’t get used, they don’t updrage to a new model and don’t replace it when it reaches the end of it’s service life.
It’s a very backhanded, passive aggressive way for the government to reduce “costs” via rationing. And it’ll be the hospitals (insisting on high prices to use an expensive machine) and insurance companies (refusing to pay those prices) that get blamed for a situation the government has created.
Doctors will continue to treat patients but the records will progressively diverge from reality until no one knows exactly what is being done for whom: just as other government statistics are already useless because they do not reflect reality.
Welcome to Soviet medicine.
Make all Federal Government employees and elected A** H**** use the EXACT SAME medical Insurance program that they are doling out to US!
Are the Doctors still liable for lawsuits if the miss a diagnose because they take fewer tests?
Yeah...kinda like VA...wonderful
Those with money will have Very Private Health Care by subscribing to membership in a type of health care club, as consumers join Costco or Sam’s Club for their household purchases now..
Those who depend on Medicare will get limited care and will die sooner, thus solving the government’s problem of too many Baby Boomers bankrupting the Socialist systems of Medicare and Social Security. It’s all been planned for us.
Squeezing money out of you? You pay your deductible and copay whether or not he does anything or not. Consider it a service charge that barely covers the overhead of the practice (office administration, receptionist, file clerk, billing personnel, etc.) Then the doc/practice bills insurance for whatever they can. After contractual adjustments, the actual payment averages about 25 to 30% of what was billed. What overhead was not covered by the co-pay and deductible (providing it wasn’t already met)is covered by the insurance payment. What’s left over goes to pay the doc. As insurance payments decrease (and refusals to pay increase), the doc has to see more people in a given time to try to keep income near the same, very unlikely that the guy is going to be increasing his income... Anyway, the more people he has to see, the less time he’s going to be able to spend with each patient. Difficult to do what the average person would consider to be a complete or adequate “screening exam” in the 15 minutes (more likely 10 minutes) allocated for each patient. Sure he could spend more time with each patient, but he won’t be paid for it. BTW, there’s not a “skin cancer screening exam” as such, so he wouldn’t be able to bill for one anyway. He would either bill for a new or return patient visit. Since you and everyone else who uses private insurance or government programs to pay for their medical care, you have abdicated your payment decisions to the payer. As such you don’t any longer have much to say about anything, other than jumping from one doc to the next, but you’ll find it’s pretty much the same everywhere, with the exception of a cash-only practice, where you pay the doc up front, and receive a receipt, and insurancr billing form you can fill out and send in for a refund (such as the insurance company is willing to pay). In that case, at least you’d be aware of what your insurance company is giving you for what you are paying them in premiums...
Sorry for the length of my sermon...
(BTW, I’m a doc)
Before too long you’ll be able to get cancer screening involving only laying down on an examination table while a dog sniffs about you for a few minutes. I’ve read claims that a trained dog can even detect melanoma before there are any outward manifestations.
Dogs can also detect some forms of internal cancers on the breath.
http://www.dogsdetectcancer.org/dogs-detect-cancer-blog/can-dogs-smell-cancer
Absolutely...
Actually they’re more liable, as with less thorough work-ups lead to less accurate diagnoses...
Sounds good, but I doubt it’s ready for mass distribution. Now if you replace the dog with a cat... Cat Scanning is a pretty widely accepted modality...
But whoever is to blame, my situation is pretty much like everyone else -- I get health insurance through my employer. My premiums are way up. My deductible is way up. My co-pay is up. If any service is performed, my insurance covers only a small part of the service, and I pay the balance out of my pocket. I am absolutely staggered by the medical bills I get these days. No one in my family is sick, we just get checkups and stuff -- and I get bill for hundreds of dollars because my insurance doesn't cover things. I paid $900 last year because my wife got a mammogram. That's the way it is now.
AND, for very practical business reasons, the medical personnel are not terribly eager to do a lot of testing and servicing unless they KNOW it's needed, and they will be reimbursed.
So I get less comprehensive care, and I pay more for it in a myriad of ways.
Government has thoroughly screwed the pooch on this one.
working their way towards Agenda 21
I have known my dermatologist since we were both in college many decades ago. I was in for something and asked him to also check my back for any suspicious moles. I took off my shirt and it took him 2 seconds to tell me I was ok. I absolutely trust him. So, maybe your GP knows what he is doing.
If a family doc spends more than about 7 minutes per patient visit these days, he’s not able to make a decent living. More than 10 minutes, and he has to close the doors and fire everyone.
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