Patients get what they pay for
Patients, in spite of what it may feel like, pay only a tiny fraction of the total health care bill directly from their own pockets. It’s no wonder then that prices and good service are hard to find.
Patients, in spite of what it may feel like, pay only a tiny fraction of the total health care bill directly from their own pockets. It’s no wonder then that prices and good service are hard to find.
The ‘modest’ 4 percent rise in health insurance premiums, when compared with wages, shows things are getting worse, not better, for health care consumers.
How would a single-payer national health insurance program change the finances for employers, workers, doctors and hospitals?
In this age of austerity, there’s almost no chance of Indianapolis hospitals creating a Cleveland Clinic-like hub of innovation.
Starting with this post, I’m going to periodically give you a peek at my reading list. I’ll highlight reports and reportage that I have found either helpful or provocative. I hope you do, too.
The local orthopedic surgeons are presenting themselves as low-cost providers in an attempt to reverse growth restrictions imposed by Obamacare.
By and large, Obamacare will leave in place the same major problems in the health care systems that existed before the law was passed—in both Indiana and across the nation.
Obamacare is destined to fail for one key reason: it will make health insurance cost more and buy less.
This is the first of three blog posts, each of which will make a compelling case for one of three distinct positions on Obamacare in Indiana: why it will succeed, why it will fail and why it will be a “non-event.”
Digging into the filings by health insurers, I concluded that half of Hoosiers buying individual coverage next year on exchanges will pay less than before Obamacare. The other half will pay more.
Even as it tries narrow networks, health insurer is trying to offer more choice of doctors now, but push for lower provider payments later.
Even with premiums doubling from 2012 to 2014, Obamacare’s subsidies will offset premium increases for most Hoosiers buying health insurance via the new federal exchanges.
Hospitals already operate like for-profit businesses, but now a financial pinch is making more hospitals join their ranks. Aggressive moves by St. Vincent’s parent organization are just the beginning.
As the Pence administration continues to negotiate with the feds, local hospitals say their recent cuts would not have been changed even if Indiana had expanded its Medicaid program.
I launched The Dose with a post about the general use-lessness of the hopsital price data released in May by the Obama adminsitration. For what it's worth, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published by the nation's largest doctors' group, agrees with me. In a perspective piece published on July 10, http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1710451, JAMA contirbutor […]
Soon to change its name to Eskenazi Health, the county-owned hospital in Indianapolis is using a business model that tries to promote patients’ health, rather than merely treat their diseases.
The Obama administration’s one-year delay on enforcement of penalties against employers that fail to offer affordable health insurance gives employers the chance to cancel their benefits for the year and pocket a boatload of cash.
I can see the business model of the physicians and hospitals at work as they recommend tests of questionable necessity. Yet when it’s my own wife and son, it’s easy to think of a terrible outcome to avert with just one more test.
Compensation in the most common physician specialties has been growing much faster than inflation for the past five years. Now, financially squeezed hospitals are set to reverse that trend.