I’m continuing my series on the reasons there are so few family physicians in the U.S. and why the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is a root cause of this deficit. My conclusions are based on recent research on the topic. Have you ever wondered why doctors tell you...
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I’m continuing my series on the reasons there are so few family physicians in the U.S. and why the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is a root cause of this deficit. My conclusions are based on recent research on the topic. In my last post, I showed how the...
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For the next several weeks, I’ll try to explain to non-physician readers why the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) billing rules create the horrid lack of primary care patients experience when they simply want to find a personal physician. My conclusions are based on recent research on the topic....
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OK, I’m back. (I had several weeks of intense work and family obligations). And OK, I’m going to go for it with the payment reform stuff. I will spend the next several weeks trying to explain to a general audience why the payment system for physicians is extremely rigged in favor...
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The Veterans Administration is once again in the news for several scandals. My disdain for the VA system is well documented. I devoted an entire chapter to the subject in my book, American HealthScare. However, I have some sympathy for the administrators of the VA system, so I thought I’d actually...
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One of the big reasons Accountable Care Organizations have been mostly disappointing is that the regulators caved to the hospitals in the writing of the Obamacare law. The regulators assumed that hospitals could wring efficiencies out of the healthcare system. Integration of hospitals and physicians was assumed to be good. A...
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It was reported a few days ago that U.S. middle class family incomes are now falling behind their counterparts in Canada, and Europe is gaining. Here is an example from a report by CBS News: “While the report confirms what many Americans feel every day when they check their bank accounts...
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There is more evidence that a large source of wasteful spending in the U.S. healthcare system comes from hospitals. The National Institute for Health Care Reform worked with the Center for Studying Health System Change to look at the variation of hospital pricing across the country. Their recent report focused exclusively...
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Patient-Centered. It sounds so right, doesn’t it? Right up there with mothers and apple pie. If only family medicine were so simple. A report by ABC news told the story of a doctor at a VA hospital in Kansas City who claims she was forced to leave her job because she...
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I confess that I haven’t paid that much attention to the horse race politics of insurance enrollment under the PPACA (Obamacare). Overall, even if 7.1 million signed up, pay their premiums, and weren’t previously insured, it still means that only a small fraction of the 50 million uninsured now have coverage....
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