Comments on: Paying Less But Getting More? Only In Health Care!

By: Elite Health

Elite Health — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:22:51 +0000

Actually, right now I am suffering from a blockage in the coronary artery and was once blocked up to 85%. I got the stent implantation which is a mesh like spring which is used to broaden the artery and hence restoring back the blood flow. You can see further information regarding stent operation from http://www.heartsite.com/html/stent.html. I got to know everything regarding my stent operation from this site. I was really unaware of such a blockage. I sometimes feel dizzy, restless, lazy , but thought that to be something related to mental ability, and hence never worried about it. Once I got my basic medical checkup at Elite health medical office in Los Angeles. The ECG report went to be something suspicious. So, they advised me to have further advance diagnosis to determine and assure regarding the problem in the heart. After my MRI , CT scan and other such scans it came to me as a shock that I was facing a problem of blockage. It was quite surprising to me, and as I was not aware of anything regarding this, I was really frightened. The doctors explained me every information regarding my health and its treatment, and suggested me to have stent operation. That was some dreadful days of my life, which I faced only because I was careless about my health. It was my luck that I somehow went for a basic checkup at elite health, but every woman out there may not be so lucky.

By: stateofthedivision

stateofthedivision — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:39:14 +0000

How Congress will deform health care with changing payment systems that echo 1990’s efforts:

http://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/2009/07/congressional-pros-to-deform-health.html

By: Russell

Russell — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:27:42 +0000

Medicare has been using episodic payment methodology in home health care for some time now, and it works a lot better than the old fee-for-service model.

By: rj walker

rj walker — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:48:52 +0000

What are the cnances a doc will just play the odds?

And doesn’t this plan reward drs to spend as little time as possible with patients?

By: stateofthedivision

stateofthedivision — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:13:32 +0000

First lie, providers aren’t all paid fee for service. DRG’s, capitation provide an incentive to manage care within financial boundaries. They have a several decade record.

The Prometheus model needs a huge inspection scheme to know what complications were avoidable vs. unavoidable. That’s just from the example given in the NYT article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/health/25chen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&hpw

Inspection does not assure quality. Reward/punishment schemes like Prometheus have a long history of distortion, Wall Street, Rick Scott’s Columbia/HCA, executive incentive stock options (over a ten year period).

Combine the Prometheus payment with bundled payments and you have an overly complex cluster _uck.

You’ll need the unemployed quants from Wall Street to model ridiculous payment schemes, especially those overlapping organizations.

If greed, fee for service money, is the problem, why will all splitting savings money work any better. It won’t. Give providers a laser-like focus on incentives/financial rewards and quality will suffer.

Accountable care organizations are vertically integrated health care. We ran this cycle with managed care in the 1990’s. It brought us Columbia/HCA and HealthSouth, two ethically challenged giants. Accountable care organizations are Glass-Steagall for health care. Get ready for “Too Big to Care.”

It’s horrific management theory, followed by massive complexity. A progressive website should be embarrassed to promote this.

Quit devising complex payment schemes. Pay providers fairly and encourage them to focus on quality.

This encourages doctors to continue acting like businessmen. Sad.