One has to grudgingly admire the skill with which the Democrats have bamboozled America’s docs into helping them kill Medicare Advantage. By attaching proposed MA cuts to the physician pay controversy, the Dems have forced the AMA to help them gut a successful free-market alternative to the soon-to-be-bankrupt traditional Medicare program.
This is not, by the way, the first time the Democrats have throttled […]
The other day, I wrote a post whose thrust was that central planning never works as well as the market (in health care or any other industry) because no group of experts can possibly possess all the information conveyed in a market-determined price.
Kevin Pho has written an excellent op-ed that illustrates the folly of central planning. Dr. Pho […]
Shawn Tully advises the readers of Fortune Magazine that John McCain’s health care plan is better than the alternatives offered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:
For all its problems, at least it puts the consumer in charge … It will create a world where health care is treated as the precious resource that it is, […]
The state of California has decided to slash Medicaid payments to physicians by more than $50 million. AMNews reports that Dr. Richard Frankenstein, President of the California Medical Association (CMA), thinks the state has created a monster:
Cutting funding for health services, particularly when it costs California valuable federal matching funds, is neither humane nor financially […]
I have read with interest several recent posts, at Kevin, MD, retired doc’s thoughts, Health Care Renewal and other docblogs, alluding to the pernicious influence of “suits” on American medicine. Being a card-carrying suit myself, I thought the following true story might illustrate why this much-despised breed exists:
I once worked for a well-run, not-for-profit hospital whose […]
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Posted 31 August 2007
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The Health Wonk Review features a post in which Matthew Holt, after seemingly interminable throat-clearing, stumbles across one of the most serious problems facing American health care:
We have a huge over-preponderance of specialists who both earn way more than primary care physicians, and use considerably more resources.
Unfortunately, Holt fails to comprehend the significance of his […]
The Associated Press has finally noticed one of the most significant and dangerous trends in health care: physician shortages in rural America. Unfortunately, the reporter assigned to the story is bent on finding an explanation for this phenomenon among the usual tendentious journalistic tropes:
A national shortage of doctors is hitting poor places the hardest, and efforts […]
Kevin, MD links to a post at Movin’ Meat, in which Shadowfax provides a (reasonably accurate) description of the perverse reimbursement system facing ER physicians, including the following breakdown of payment rates by payer:
Bill Gates (cash customer): $474
Commercial insurance: $220-400
Medicare: $161
Medicaid: $90
Typical “cash customer” (aka uninsured) $25
Unfortunately, he fails to absorb the blindingly obvious implications […]
Depending on one’s political leanings, the term “supply-side” evokes cheerful images of free market prosperity or gloomy visions of corporate greed. Either way, it probably does not immediately present itself as a basis for health care reform. Nonetheless, Josh Hendrickson suggests that a supply-side approach may offer a cure for the ills of our medical […]
Among health care finance professionals, it is well known that a small (but usually very vocal) minority of physicians hold extraordinarily childlike views on health care economics. Dr. Terry Bennett is a case in point. Via Kevin, MD, the good doctor makes one of the most naïve assertions I have encountered in more than twenty […]
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Posted 02 April 2007
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