BLOG TIME AGAIN

It is only a week into summer but the August doldrums have made an early appearance.

Perhaps it was the weather perfect weekend with another one just ahead. Or, it could be that there is no Council meeting until next Monday. Anyhow, the incentives to write are just not there.

I am not a great “Futball” fan. Soccer is just a bunch of disorganized people running and chasing a ball that more than half the time someone kicks it to a member of the other team.

Like pro basketball it seems that the best time to watch the game is the last 5 scheduled minutes. At least that was the case Sunday.

Borowitz in his report wrote “The E.U. spokesman, Alf-Jergen Holmboe, said the replacement of American football with soccer was the third in a three-step plan to transform the U.S. into a European country.
“The first two steps were electing a socialist President and instituting national health care,” he said. “Once soccer replaces football, our work will be done.”
In our part of the country with a large 1^st/2^nd Generation Europeans and an equally large Hispanic population soccer has been their national sport and the interest can become pathological.

Once more health care is making the news. The ACA rules have been changed again so that those who obtained their coverage through the state “Exchanges” will be abler to automatically renew their policies. In most areas there will be a high single digit to a mid-level double digit increase in premiums; in some cases there will be less expensive same level insurance available from a different carrier. It will be possible to switch carriers where there is a choice; but the “paper work” will have to be done again.

Both the Times and the WSJ this weekend carried stories of the treatment problems in the military hospitals which are similar to the VA’s. It seems that it in government run facilities the supervision and therefore correction of quality care deficiencies has been lackadaisical. Incidents are given of tragic results including deaths or permanent disability as the result of care errors.

“A new study from the National Institute for Health Care Reform (NIHCR) suggests that the easy buck helps explain the current wave of practice acquisitions by hospitals. Researchers found that hospital outpatient departments may charge 2 or 3 times more for common diagnostic imaging, colonoscopies, and lab tests than if those services were rendered in community settings such as a physician's office or a free-standing imaging or ambulatory surgery center.

Colonoscopies, for example, cost on average $1383 on an outpatient basis versus $625 charged by community-based providers. In Indianapolis, Indiana, knee MRIs that cost on average $563 in community settings ballooned to $1540 in outpatient departments, reported study authors James Reschovsky, PhD, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, and Chapin White, PhD, a researcher at RAND.”

 There have also been several articles about excessive reimbursements for PT as well as for a rare noninvasive office cardiology procedure mostly by “providers” in groups with multiple offices some of which are "owned“by non-medical individuals. These are being as they should be for fraud.

It seems that there is nothing new in the world; if you can game the system do so.