Tag: "hospital"

Report: Hospitals Who Want to Collect Fees should Provide Better Cost Estimates

Hand Holding Cash ca. 1998

Historically hospitals have not really had to worry about collect directly from patients. On average patient cost-sharing is only about 3% when patients enter the hospital. Health care providers generally focus on insurance reimbursement. Maybe that is changing with the growing prevalence of high deductible plans. Now hospital patients can potentially owe several thousand dollars depending on whether they’ve met their deductibles and their cost-sharing arrangements.

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Jun 27, 2017 | 39 comments | by

Medical Errors Third Leading Cause of Death?

Apparently medical care is bad for you!

According to data from the British Medical Journal, in an article brought to us by Vox, a quarter of a million people died of medical errors in 2013. Medical errors were exceeded as a cause of death only by cancer (585,000 people) and heart disease (611,000 people).  Death from motor vehicle accidents paled in comparison (34,000) – as did death from firearms (34,000) and suicide (41,000).

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Feb 03, 2017 | 7 comments | by

Is this the Insurance Casualty Model; Or Just a Dirty Trick?

The health insurance “Casualty Model” is alive and well in Georgia — but only as a punishment for not signing an in-network agreement or accepting usual and customary reimbursement for emergency room treatments.  At issue is a Georgia hospital (and one in Los Angeles) that are not part of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia network. Because neither of the hospitals are part of the insurer’s network, when covered individuals go to the hospitals’ emergency rooms, the insurer sends reimbursement checks for emergency care directly to enrollees. The enrollees are then supposed to endorse the checks over to the hospital.  This is similar to the casualty model when an insurer provides funds for a covered claim and the covered individual shops around and receives a service at the provider of their choice. When someone slid into my car during an ice storm a few years ago, an adjuster came to my office and calculated an estimate. I received the check and was told I could get my car repaired almost anywhere for the estimated amount.

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Jun 30, 2016 | 5 comments | by

Congressional Budget Resolutions Shoot for the Sky; Miss Low-Hanging Fruit

The House Budget Committee and the Senate Budget Committee have passed budget resolutions that shoot for the sky with respect to health reform. Their proposals recommit the Republican majorities to patient-centered health reform and show a path forward for the next president. However, they do not harvest some low-hanging fruit offered by President Obama. Failure to do so might doom patient-centered health reform to the forever future.

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Mar 23, 2015 | 8 comments | by

Unconnected Medical Devices Harm Patients

The federal government’s dominance of health information Technology (HIT) has been most apparent, and most harmful, in electronic health records (EHRs). However, the hand of government must lie heavily in other parts of health care, too.

An example is medical devices hooked up to patients at the hospital. Remarkably, these devices do not talk to each other, requiring nurses to waste time transcribing data from one device to another. This infographic summarizes a survey of 500 nurses commissioned by the West Health Institute:

Copyright: West Health Institute (2015)

Copyright: West Health Institute (2015)

 

These are appalling figures. I don’t know about you, but I figured out how to connect my VCR to my TV sometime during the 1980s. Medical devices are heavily regulated by the FDA. The fact that devices critical to hospital patients’ health are still not connected strikes me as a likely consequence of over-regulation.

Mar 13, 2015 | 1 comment | by

Weak Health Jobs Growth; Mostly in Hospitals and Physicians’ Offices

Today’s employment report, cheered as positive, had a grey lining for health workers. January’s report showed a big boost in health jobs, but that reversed itself in February.

Total nonfarm payroll increased by 295,000 from January, but only 24,000 (fewer than 8 percent of the total) were health jobs. And 9,000 of those jobs were in hospitals. Physicians’ offices saw 7,000 jobs, but employment in other health facilities grew only slightly or shrank (Table 1).

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Mar 06, 2015 | Leave a Comment | by

Safety-Net Hospitals Profit Under Obamacare

Guess what? Those safety-net hospitals in states that did not expand Medicaid, which were pleading that they would go bust unless that welfare program grew, are doing just fine:

Hospitals that treat many poor and uninsured patients were expected to face tough financial times in states that did not expand Medicaid under the federal law known as Obamacare.

That’s because they would get less Medicare and Medicaid funding under the Affordable Care Act, while still having to provide high levels of charity care.

But in some of the largest states that did not expand Medicaid, many safety-net hospitals fared pretty well last year — even better than in 2013 in many cases, according to their financial documents. KHN looked at the performance of about a dozen such hospitals in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia and Kansas, which released their 2014 financial results. (Phil Galewitz, MedCityNews)

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Mar 06, 2015 | 3 comments | by

Hospital Administrative Costs Higher In U.S. than Other Countries

pic3

The Commonwealth Fund has sponsored yet another study that concludes that the U.S. health system is less efficient than others. This time, the measurement is specifically hospitals’ administrative costs. As always, it recommends single-payer, government monopoly as the solution. Readers of this blog know that I am not about to defend hospitals’ bloated administrative costs. However, the Commonwealth Fund’s scholars go way off-base when it comes to capital costs:

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Oct 10, 2014 | 2 comments | by

3 of 4 Physicians Say Government-Sponsored EHRs Not Worth the Cost

Mitch Morris, MD, of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions discusses the results of the firm’s latest survey of U.S. physicians:

Three out of four physicians surveyed report that EHRs increase costs and do not save them time. This survey is not alone in its findings: Through another recently released survey, Clem McDonald and colleagues found that physicians say that EHRs “waste an average of 48 minutes per day.”

But those of us working with hospitals and physicians on a regular basis don’t need a survey to tell us things are not quite right. Just look at the rapidly growing profession of scribes — people who follow around doctors taking down their observations for recording in an EHR. Meaningful Use? Really?

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Sep 24, 2014 | 2 comments | by

Price Transparency: Even Hospitals are Starting to Figure It Out!

credit-card-2Like many, we’ve been frustrated at the lack of price transparency in U.S. health care, especially form hospitals. Good news: They are coming around!

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has published an informative white paper, clearly explaining the state of price transparency for both hospitals and health plans. It surveys what hospitals are doing to ensure patients better understand their expected out-of-pocket costs, what tools health plans are offering beneficiaries to estimate costs, and the legal and regulatory environment. The language used in the white paper is strikingly different from that which we are used to seeing from hospitals:

Price transparency also can lead to improved quality and efficiency as providers benchmark and improve their performance against peers and national averages. To realize these potential benefits, policymakers and the public increasingly are calling for greater access to information.

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Aug 07, 2014 | 15 comments | by
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