People who live in rural areas often have a hard time finding physicians who will treat them. Nearly 80% of rural areas are designated ‘medically underserved’ according to Washington Post. In Van Horn, Texas, for example, there is one physician for a community of 11,000 square miles.
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
Nursing Homes Get Aggressive to Collect Unpaid Debts
Kaiser Health News (KHN) and National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article about nursing homes in Upstate New York pursing friends and family to collect on unpaid debts owed by loved ones. Often times there was no obvious financial connection between the person being sued and the person with unpaid debts to the nursing home. One lady interviewed was a sister who had only gone to visit her brother when he was in a nursing home for a couple months. In another case a son helped admit his mother into a nursing home and became the target of lawsuits to pay her bills.
Covid-Chasing Travel Nurse Bubble Burst but Not Going Away
The Wall Street Journal had an article about the falling use of travel nurses. At the peak of the pandemic nurses willing to travel from one hot spot to another could sometimes earn as much as $10,000 per week.
Hospitals across the U.S. have had to dig deep to treat patients during the Covid-19 pandemic as some of the most lucrative parts of their business, elective surgeries, were constantly postponed. The flip side of that has been a bonanza for the companies that helped them keep staffing levels adequate as well as for the brave and flexible people who filled those positions.
By contrast, nurses who stayed in their regular jobs often found themselves working mandatory overtime in understaffed hospitals filled to the brim with Covid patients. When they complained about too many hours, low wages and a lack of personal protection equipment their complaints were often dismissed.
Thursday Links
- In Fixing Food, Richard A. Williams, a 30-year cost-benefit analyst at the FDA, says the agency isn’t protecting the public. Book review here.
- John Cochrane video on free market health insurance.
- Nearly 5 million people are paying no premium at all for their Obamacare Insurance. (WSJ) But if they had the cash, almost all of them would do something else with it.
- Next big thing in cannabis: a gentler high that offers relaxation and pain relief without the anxiety or fuzzy-headedness of regular weed.
- In Vancouver, you can get a fentanyl high for free – courtesy of the Canadian public health system.
- Kim Bellard at The Health Care Blog admits he has been wrong. About his belief in managed care? Or, managed competition? Or, his failure to appreciate the power of markets? Or, patient power? No. None of these. He was wrong because he hoped people would care more about health and more about patients than profits. Not exactly the mea culpa we were looking for.