Hits & Misses – 2009/8/6
Obesity/Ambulance Update: Lincoln Fire and Rescue is considering putting a construction crane and a forklift on call for emergency patients who are too big to get out a door or down steps.
The “public plan” soldiers have to use: More than one in six soldiers and their families have to go off base for their medical care.
One in six soldiers have to go off base for their medical care? Perhaps the deployment of medical corps personnel to Iraq and Afghanistan is causing military doctor shortages back here in the United States…
This illustrates just how little flexibility public health care programs have. A man uses an ambulance 603 times over a 40 month period at a cost of $118,000. That works out to nearly $3,000 per month just for ambulance service. Add to that the cost of hospital emergency room care for each trip. The cost for care in the ER probably far exceeds the ambulance costs. This is a perfect example of the waste, fraud and abuse that the public sector is ill equipped to deal with. I imagine a home care nurse and a telemedicine service would cost a small fraction of what the state currently spends to prove Mr. Graham with substandard care.
Brian, when you make the price zero and ration by waiting, demand always exceed supply. If people go off base it means that they at least have enough income to be able to purchase in the marketplace what they cannot get from the government for free.
I think that many people may have misread the original article abouit military families seeking care in the civilian market.
As I read the article, and based on my 27 years of active duty experience, those military families that could not get an appointment in a MTF within 7 days (current TRICARE standard) were sent off base, AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE, to see a physician, even though it costs the military more money than seeing them later in a MTF.