Tag: "emergency room"

NYT Finds Privatized Health Care It Likes

It’s efficient

Emergency room use has been reduced by 50 percent, hospital admissions by 53 percent, specialty care visits by 65 percent and visits to primary care doctors by 36 percent.

It’s high quality

Patients are virtually guaranteed a doctor’s appointment on the day they request it, and their calls are answered quickly, usually within 30 seconds. The percentage of children receiving high-quality care for asthma has soared from 35 percent to 85 percent, the percentage of infants receiving needed immunizations by age 2 has risen above 90 percent, the percentage of diabetics with blood sugar under control ranks in the top 10 percentile of a standard national benchmark, and customer and employee satisfaction rates top 90 percent.

It’s definitely not following ObamaCare guidelines

Southcentral has unique attributes (it even refers cases to traditional tribal healers if doctors agree).

Full editorial on Alaska’s successful health care system.

Aug 01, 2012 | 5 comments | by

More Evidence on Priceless

Three years after the Massachusetts’ health reform began, a study found the percent of people reporting they could not get needed care from specialists was little changed (7.1% vs. 7.0%). There was also no change in the percentage who said they visited an emergency room for a condition that could have been treated in a physician’s office. Now a new study finds that low income patients have much more difficulty getting access to care:

Compared with the privately insured, a significantly higher proportion of patients with Medicaid or Commonwealth Care Type 1 [subsidized insurance] reported delaying or not getting dental care (42.2 % vs. 27.1 %) or medication (30.0 % vs. 7.0 %) due to cost; those with Medicaid also experienced cost-related barriers to seeing a specialist (14.6 % vs. 3.5 %) or getting recommended tests (15.6 % vs. 5.9 %). HT: Sarah Kliff.

Jul 30, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Is the ED the Hospital’s Cash Cow?

Growing use of U.S. emergency departments (EDs), cited as a key contributor to rising health care costs, has become a leading target of health care reform. ED visit rates increased by more than a third between 1997 and 2007…The number of hospital admissions increased by 15.0%, from 34.3 million in 1993 to 39.5 million in 2006; admissions from the ED increased by 50.4%, from 11.5 million to 17.3 million. The proportion of all inpatient stays involving admission from the ED increased from 33.5 to 43.8%.

Source: NEJM.

Jul 16, 2012 | 3 comments | by

Remember How ObamaCare Insures the Uninsured

About half of the newly insured will be in Medicaid. Here is the California Health Care Foundation’s survey of California Medicaid patients, as summarized by Chris Jacobs:

  • More than two in five (42%) California adults in Medicaid had difficulty getting an appointment with a specialist, compared to 24% with private coverage.
  • Nearly half (47%) of all beneficiaries in poor health said it was difficult to find specialists accepting their insurance—a rate more than twice as high as those adults with other health coverage (23%).
  • More than one-third (34%) of all California Medicaid enrollees in excellent, very good, or good health were forced to make a trip to the emergency room in the past 12 months, compared to just 14% of those with other coverage.
  • More than half (55%) of all Medicaid enrollees in fair or poor health visited the emergency room at least once in the past year, compared to only one-quarter (25%) of those in poor health with other coverage.
Jun 11, 2012 | 3 comments | by

Dropping Health Insurance, and Other Links

Consultants to employers: drop health insurance.

Does the president have an “enemies list”?

A tribute to Milton Friedman. HT: Greg Mankiw.

More than 70 percent of people who abuse prescription pain relievers obtain the drugs from friends or relatives, usually with permission and for free.

Hospital debt collectors catch deadbeats in the emergency room and in hospital beds.

May 01, 2012 | 5 comments | by

BREAKING: HHS Proposes Delaying ICD-10 Deadline to Oct. 1, 2014

Until then, emergency rooms around the country will just have to guess between W22.02XA and W22.02XD.

W22.02XA is the code for “walked into lamppost, initial encounter.”
W22.02XD is the code for “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter.”

Entire article in Modern Healthcare worth reading.

Apr 10, 2012 | 5 comments | by

A $5,000 Tummy Ache

The cost for just walking in the door of the emergency room? That came to $1,288. The ultrasound nicked him an additional $1,135. A comprehensive metabolic panel (blood analysis) was billed at $1,212. Moser was also charged $158, accidentally, for the saline solution he had turned down. The total came to $4,852.55, not counting separate bills that would arrive later and total nearly $1,000, including $540 for pathology and $309 for the doctor.

 Source: Steve Lopez in the LA Times. HT: Jason Shafrin.

Apr 04, 2012 | 11 comments | by

The Downside of Japanese Health Care

[P]atients can nearly always see a doctor within a day. But they must often wait hours for a three-minute consultation. Complicated cases get too little attention. The Japanese are only a quarter as likely as the Americans or French to suffer a heart attack, but twice as likely to die if they do.

Some doctors see as many as 100 patients a day. Because their salaries are low, they tend to overprescribe tests and drugs. (Clinics often own their own pharmacies.) They also earn money, hotel-like, by keeping patients in bed. Simple surgery that in the West would involve no overnight stay, such as a hernia operation, entails a five-day hospital stay in Japan.

Emergency care is often poor. In lesser cities it is not uncommon for ambulances to cruise the streets calling a succession of emergency rooms to find one that can cram in a patient. In a few cases people have died because of this. One reason for a shortage of emergency care is an abundance of small clinics instead of big hospitals. Doctors prefer them because they can work less and earn more.

Full article on Japanese health care here.

Sep 20, 2011 | 4 comments | by

Hospital ER Visits Up Since Mass Health Reform Enacted

To determine whether any changes in ED utilization in Massachusetts reflected the effect of Massachusetts’ reform or were merely representative of broader regional trends in ED utilization, we used New Hampshire and Vermont as control states…

The data on combined inpatient and outpatient ED [Emergency Department] use (top graph) suggest that the Massachusetts reform did not change the state’s trend in total ED utilization relative to that in states where no such reform was enacted. The continuous upward trend in ED utilization throughout the three periods is remarkably consistent from state to state; if we didn’t know which state had implemented the reform law, we could not guess on the basis of these data….. In summary, ED use increased in Massachusetts after reform but also increased by similar amounts in New Hampshire and Vermont, states that did not implement insurance expansions.

NEJM article here.

Sep 19, 2011 | 5 comments | by

What’s Wrong With This Study?

Tests such as CT scans and ultrasounds add to hospital bills, but doctors said that such tests given right after patients showed up in emergency rooms only helped with diagnosis in roughly one of three cases, the study — published in the Archives of Internal Medicine — said.

Full article on doctors requiring fewer tests to diagnose patients.

Aug 25, 2011 | 6 comments | by
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