- Antos: Against Medicare coverage for hearing aids.
- 58% of Payers Use Outcomes-Based Contracts for Prescription Drugs
- In the US, 85-90% of people who have sudden cardiac arrests do not survive. A home defibrillator cost $1,000. (NYT)
- Michael Milken: “We can now reasonably speculate about therapies that will give us the ability to clean tiny cancers from our bodies as routinely as dentists clean our teeth.”
- How Medicaid regulates drug prices.
Category: Direct Primary Care
Should You Jumpstart Your Heart at Home?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you have probably seen television shows where doctors revived a patient whose heart had stopped. If you’re old enough, you probably even know people who have suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. My grandfather had one, but I know of numerous others. Something they all have in common is they’re all dead. About 85 to 90 percent of people who suffer a sudden cardiac arrest do not survive, because they don’t get help in time.
Why a Telephone Consult is Billed as a Hospital Visit
I have often told the story about the time my wife unknowingly tried to schedule a CT scan at a nearby hospital outpatient department. As luck would have it, prior authorization is all that saved us from a huge bill, of which her share was going to be $2,700. I quickly found a free-standing radiology clinic that had a contract with Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Texas for $403. Oddly enough, BCBS was willing to approve a scan at either facility. Nobody called her to explain the huge mistake she was about to make by getting a diagnostic scan at a hospital-owned facility. Here is the thing: Health insurers, Medicare and Medicaid pay hospitals higher prices for the same services that are available elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. Neither do payers alert patients that cheaper alternatives exist.
Equal Occupational Fatality Day
“Equal Pay Day” calculates how much longer women must work going into this year, to earn what men earned last year, on the average. It occurred on March 14 this year, and was highlighted in Washington, D.C. with the usual liberal fanfare.
Naturally, the calculation ignores the fact that men and women work in very different occupations.
To demonstrate how much that matters, American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry has calculated how many more years women would have to work in their selected occupations before they achieve the same death rate that men endured last year.