If you are one of those people who believe that giving our masters in Washington full control over our health care delivery system will make things more efficient, I recommend GruntDoc’s latest post on the National Provider Identifier (NPI).
For anyone lucky enough to be unaware of the NPI, it is the latest number that CMS has ordered providers […]
Barack Obama offers a health care reform plan that envisions a much larger role for the federal government in the day-to-day operation of our medical delivery system.
Before signing on, however, the voters would be wise to consider the bureaucratic mismanagement that plagues the government health care programs we already have.
ER Nursey provides an illustrative example of the moronic policies […]
I noted recently that a gang of pirates auditors was about to descend on America’s hospitals in search of Medicare “overpayments.” These “Recovery Audit Contractors,” who are paid a percentage of the booty recoveries, will be ransacking patient charts in search of “errors.”
Well, the RAC program is now being rolled out nationwide, and this CMS report outlining the results of the original pilot project […]
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Posted 13 May 2008
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“Cognitive dissonance” is defined as the “psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.” If this concept has any validity at all, Shadowfax’s psychological landscape must have looked like a war zone after writing this post about the latest “never event” idiocy from CMS. The gist of the post is captured in the following passage:
CMS would have you believe that this is […]
Single-payer activists tell us that Medicare-for-All would be nothing like socialized medicine because health care providers would not be directly owned and operated by our masters in D.C. In the real world, however, the golden rule (He who has the gold, rules.) applies to health care just as it does to everything else.
If government bureaucrats control who gets paid […]
Jethro Bodine, that inimitable character from the old Beverly Hillbillies show, could never quite decide whether to become a brain surgeon or a fry cook. Sadly, such such career dilemmas are all too real under socialized medicine. Arnold Kling relays the following gag that illustrates this reality as it manifests itself in Cuba:
One Cuban young woman complains to another. “He lied to me! […]
Free market reform advocates object to single-payer health care for a variety of reasons, including our belief that such a system would involve government micromanagement of hospitals and doctors. As if to prove our point, Medicare is about to send out an army of auditors whose primary mission is to put the clinical and billing decisions of providers under the microscope:
‘What […]
I’m no Bush basher, but this time he has really pissed me off. As part of a belated effort to get federal spending under control, he wants to cut Medicare payments to hospitals. Here’s how it will work, according to the NYT:
The largest amount of Medicare savings, by far, would come from hospitals: $15 billion from an across-the-board reduction […]
Did you think you were safe from the whims of CMS apparatchiks simply because you’re not a geezer yet? Think again.
Because Medicare bureaucrats have, in their infinite wisdom, decreed a reimbursement rate that barely covers half the cost of certain cancer drugs, many private patients will probably be denied life-saving treatment:
New Medicare rules for this class of radioimmunotherapy cancer drugs may bar thousands of lymphoma patients from […]
We are often told by the advocates of government-run health care that a single-payer system would be innocuous because our masters inside the beltway would not actually own hospitals or employ clinicians. Well, the WSJ Health Blog demonstrates the vacuity of that assertion by explaining the latest P4P proposal from the single-payer system known as […]
