Category: Health Care Quality

Mark Sklar, MD, in the Wall Street Journal:

The push to use electronic medical records has had more than financial costs.

Yet to avoid future financial penalties from Medicare, I must demonstrate “meaningful use” of the electronic record. This involves documenting that I covered a checklist of items during the office visit, so I spend 90 minutes each day entering mostly meaningless data. This is time better spent calling patients to answer questions or keeping updated with the medical literature.

My practice quickly adopted the new Medicare requirements for electronically prescribing medications. Yet patients often do not want their prescription sent electronically.

If I don’t electronically prescribe for a certain number of Medicare patients, I am penalized with a decrease in reimbursement that can rise to a maximum of 5%. Patients should have a choice in how their prescriptions are delivered, and physicians shouldn’t be penalized for how the patients choose.

Print

A recent New York Times article lamented that employers are increasingly offering employee health plans that cover few medical expenses until a fairly high deductible has been met. About one-third of large employers offer only a high-deductible plan. Many other employers encourage enrollment in high-deductible plans by offering low employee contributions. As a result, more employees are covered by high-deductible plans and workers increasingly have to reach for their wallet before insurance kicks in. As news stories often do, the article used a tear-jerker of an anecdote to drive home its point. The subject of the story was Anita Maina. Although her monthly premiums were only $34 per month, her deductible was $6,000 and her health savings account not well-funded. Here’s the story:

Anita Maina was working on an arts and crafts project she found on Pinterest — creating a table out of wood and cork — when she ripped off a fingernail while removing staples from a piece of wood.

But she ultimately skipped the [office] visit since she had not met the $6,000 deductible on her health plan, and she knew she probably did not have much left in her health savings account…

The New York Times article even included a photo of Ms. Maina with her injured finger!

Print

I once heard Dr. Roy Cordato of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina describe an unusual metaphor. Imagine that you wanted to open an Italian restaurant. In the town where you want to open it, you need to apply to the municipal authorities for a Certificate of Need. That is, before you put any of your capital or reputation into actually opening and operating the restaurant, you have to prove to bureaucrats and politicians that the town “needs” it. So, even though no taxpayers’ dollars are invested in your business, you are not allowed to take this risk before writing applications and participating in hearings to prove the unprovable: That potential customers “need” your Italian restaurant.

Who else is monitoring your application and participating in hearings? Owners of Italian restaurants that already exist. They have reams of data that prove that they fully satisfy the demand for Italian cuisine in the town. You have none. They have effective veto power over the entry of new competitors. You do not need a PhD in economics to predict that such a town would have a shortage of Italian restaurants with very high prices.

Yet, this unacceptable situation exists for hospitals or other healthcare facilities in 36 states and the District of Columbia. Thomas Stratmann and Jake Russ of the Mercatus Center have used a newly compiled database of these laws to examine their consequences. Their key findings are:

Print

The Commonwealth Fund has released another edition of its Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 2014 Update: How the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally. Following tradition, it concludes that the American health “system” is the worst of eleven developed countries. This time, it prompted the editorialists at the New York Times to conclude:

 Britain and Switzerland were top scorers in a study examining the quality and efficiency of health care systems in 11 advanced nations by a leading American research organization. As usual, the United States finished last overall and last on several important measures of cost and health outcomes, despite having the most costly system in the world.

The poor results for the United States reflect the high cost of its medical care and the absence of universal health insurance, a situation being addressed by the Affordable Care Act.

Other advanced nations are far ahead in the game because they have long had universal health coverage and promoted strong ties between patients and doctors.

Print