In a ground breaking study, researchers at Johns Hopkins University discovered hospital emergency departments overcharge. I know… Who would have thought ER prices are high? The study looked at 12,000 billing records for emergency medicine doctors nationwide.
Three quarters of specialists in Emergency Departments are seeing more patients since January 1, 2014, according to a survey released by the American College of Emergency Physicians:
The U.S. economy shrank during the first quarter of 2014.
Adult obesity rate in U.S. is at 27.7%, the highest since 2008.
Medicare overpaid $6.7 billion in 2010 for evaluation and management services.
Wikipedia entries for 9 of 10 most expensive heath conditions have significant errors.
Emergency room visits increase in wake of ObamaCare.
Nanotech chip detects signs of cancer in blood protein markers.
318,000 federal workers owe $3.3 billion in back taxes.
1 in 4 Americans now consults Google before going to doctor.
California counties sue drug-makers for marketing painkillers in accordance with FDA regulation.
A mouthwash you can swallow: Red wine fights cavities!
Social traits of thrift, docility and nonviolence have been bred within agrarian societies.
Most emergency room “frequent fliers” have a substance abuse addiction.
Alcohol triggers junk food cravings.
New pill designed to treat symptoms of hunger (I thought that was called celery).
Think ObamaCare is all bad news for hospitals? Not according to a new study:
We estimated that hospital revenue from ED care exceeded costs for that care by $6.1 billion in 2009, representing a profit margin of 7.8 percent (net revenue expressed as a percentage of total revenue). However, this is primarily because hospitals make enough profit on the privately insured ($17 billion) to cover underpayment from all other payer groups, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and unreimbursed care. Assuming current payer reimbursement rates, ACA reforms could result in an additional 4.4-percentage-point increase in profit margins for hospital-based EDs compared to what could be the case without the reforms.
Red wine is healthier when it’s non-alcoholic (sorry).
ObamaCare premiums are about to skyrocket; they will double in some parts of the country.
The Obama Administration is will spending $17 million a month advertising for ObamaCare.
Emergency room visits increased after Massachusetts health reform was enacted.
Half of callers to Covered California give up as deadline looms.
Stunning finding: Saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease.
Laszewski trashes the new Republican health plan.
Johnathan Chait: Is the new Republican plan really a plan or is it just promises, promises?
Are we headed toward a zero marginal cost society?
Medicaid is a welfare program jointly funded by federal and state governments, which claims to provide health insurance to low income people. A few years ago, Oregon expanded Medicaid enrollment by lottery. This created an excellent environment to study the effects of being uninsured versus being enrolled in Medicaid, because it approximated a randomized-controlled trial — the gold standard of medical research, but seldom conducted in the social sciences.
The latest result of the study, published in Science, reported that Medicaid increased use of emergency rooms by 40 percent (gated abstract here, and reported here).
This result is important for anticipating the consequences of ObamaCare. About half of the 30-plus million people expected to get health insurance under ObamaCare will be enrolled in Medicaid, not private health insurance. Already, the Administration asserts that four million new Medicaid enrollees have signed up via ObamaCare (but this estimate has been questioned).
A number of years ago, Governor Romney told me that under Massachusetts health reform people would go to physicians’ offices for care instead of going to the emergency room. He wasn’t saying that Massachusetts would deliver more care. He was saying that the care would be more appropriate and less expensive.
As it turns out he was wrong. Traffic to the ER in Massachusetts today is higher than it was before the state’s health reform was enacted.
The same argument has been used by President Obama and by supporters of the Affordable Care Act. And now it turns out they are wrong too. As The New York Times reports:
The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance.
This is consistent with our own predictions in an NCPA study done soon after the ACA was passed. Ah, if only they had listened.
