Tag Archives: walk in clinics

Occupational Licensing and Health Spending

(A version of this Health Alert was published by The Hill.)

In July, the Obama administration released an important report on the harmful effects of occupational licensing. Compiled by experts at the Department of the Treasury, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Department of Labor, and bearing the imprimatur of the White House itself, the report concludes that:

There is evidence that licensing requirements raise the price of goods and services, restrict employment opportunities, and make it more difficult for workers to take their skills across State lines.

Reducing the burden of licensing would give consumers more choices at lower prices. Nowher Nowhere is this need more pressing than in healthcare, where licensing restrictions dominate. According to the report, almost 90 percent of health professionals need licenses to practice.

This seems reasonable. After all, most people don’t want just any old Joe ripping out their wisdom teeth or handing out medicines for any ailment. However, even in these cases, the argument for licensing is overblown. Continue reading Occupational Licensing and Health Spending

RAND: Retail Clinics Work

Via Sarah Kliff:

The RAND researchers started by looking at where patients go when they have a new medical problem. Using that metric, they found that visits to retail clinics were associated with fewer trips to the primary care doctor to diagnose a new problem. Those who went to a retail clinic were also less likely to see their primary care doctor going forward…

It didn’t matter whether a patient went to a retail clinic or a primary care doctor; they still got the same amount of preventive care.

Can Walk-in Clinics Provide Chronic Care?

I have always believed that the only thing standing between chronic patients and a dynamic, competitive market that provides low-cost, state-of-the-art chronic care is the third-party payer system.

By definition, walk-in clinics are outside the system — although many third-party payers pay their fees. Because they entered the market for cash-paying patients who are concerned about the time cost of care as well as the money cost, they are free to do what conventional practitioners cannot do — repackage and reprice their services in response to changing market conditions.

Can these clinics cater to the needs of chronic patients? Apparently some are going to try. Some doctors are upset, but they should focus on a different source of their problems — the AMA, which bought into and profits from the CPT code system that retail clinics are free to ignore.

Solving the Problems of the Medically Underserved with Walk-in Clinics

If Barack Obama is serious about curtailing health care costs, promoting electronic medical records and electronic prescribing, and is increasing access to care, he could make a huge leap forward with a single decision: let Medicare cover the services of walk-in clinics and encourage states to do the same with Medicaid. In principle, these clinics could meet all kinds of needs of the medically underserved. A new study finds of 1,200 clinics nationwide, only 10% of walk-in clinics are in poor neighborhoods. That's because the clinics go where the money is. The solution: let Medicare and Medicaid pay the same market rates everyone else pays – rather than pre-determined government rates.

Anybody Can Own a Walk-in Clinic, Except Doctors

Hospitals are invading the market:

Around the country, hospitals are now affiliated with more than 25 Wal-Mart clinics. The Cleveland Clinic has lent its name and backup services to a string of CVS drugstore clinics in northeastern Ohio. And the Mayo Clinic is in the game, operating one Express Care clinic at a supermarket in Rochester, Minn., and a second one across town at a shopping mall.

Consumers who use the clinics are often "exactly the customers that hospitals want – women of child-bearing age….. the hospitals want to deliver babies.

So why can't doctors own walk-in clinics? Answer: Pete Stark.

Try the Old Fashioned Way

Obstacles for Obama's health reform: a shortage of primary care physicians. Obvious solution: supply and demand. Obvious, in that, that's how we solve the problem in every other market.

Where allowed to do so, walk-in clinics manned by nurses fill the void and the potential for handing off routine activities to physician assistants and paramedics has barely been tapped. Skilled personnel who treated our troops in the field aren't allowed to treat patients back home.

And when patients pay with their own money, they have no trouble finding physicians who help them lower both the time cost and the money cost of their care.

Walk-in Clinics

NEWS FLASH: Led by Pete Stark (D-CA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA), House Democrats today announced a plan to provide low-cost, high-quality, easy-access primary care to millions of low- and moderate-income Americans, including millions of the uninsured.  The plan: override a slew of anachronistic, bureaucratic, anti-entrepreneurial regulations that are thwarting the spread of walk-in clinics in drug stores, shopping malls and big box retail outlets and keeping them from realizing their full potential.  Among the regulations to be set aside is legislation authored by Stark himself.

Oops.  I was just day dreaming. Continue reading Walk-in Clinics