I admit I’m drawn to articles in the medical literature that question conventional practices, especially expensive ones. But the implications of a recent editorial in JAMA were even more profound than most. I won’t repeat the entire article here, but these were some of the most important points: There has been...
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I’m back from the big annual TAFP meeting, and once again my colleagues tell me stories of crazy practices in the private sector. Here is one from a doctor in Plano. A 27-year-old male patient of his went to the ER with chest pain. The EKG showed early repolarization and the...
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I’m off to the Texas Academy of Family Physicians annual session in Austin this week. It will be very exciting for me. On Thursday, I’ll present my new primary care payment proposal to the Commission on Health Care Services and Managed Care. I believe the meeting is open to all TAFP...
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A lot of friends have asked me what I think of the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the constitutionality of the Obama Healthcare Law. I tell them it makes no difference. Some of them retort and mention the newly insured people. I agree the PPACA will help them by providing health insurance,...
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This post will be a little longer than usual. If you’re not sure what a full-service family physician can do, this story’s for you. The following is the body of an email sent by one of our 3rd-year JPS family medicine RESIDENTS about his experiences working at a regional hospital in...
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A normally very respectable and reliable source of healthcare observations, the Center for Studying Health System Change (CSHSC), had a bad day recently. A report by one of its fellows for the Commonwealth Fund modeled “real-world” parameters found that if primary care physicians were paid more, Medicare could save 2%. Two...
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I’m subscribed to a service that sends out daily emails about philanthropic funding in healthcare. It’s full of regional and national foundations who, with the best of intentions, are trying to make our healthcare system better. Most of the funding falls under two categories: 1) infrastructure building such as new wings...
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I’ve seen a few commentaries that suggest healthcare inflation is slowing. There are different opinions about the root causes – merely a consequence of the general economic slowdown vs. a true change in utilization patterns. Two recent reports suggest that costs healthcare inflation is not really slowing and is still greater...
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Last week I wrote about the comparison between the average hospital costs of U.S. hospitals compared to other developed countries. The bottom line is that U.S. hospital average length of stay and total hospital days per adult per year compare very favorably to the rest of the world. But the cost...
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Hospitals are the single largest category of healthcare expenses nationally, accounting for about 1/3 of all healthcare costs.A recent summary of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development by the Commonwealth Fund shed light on realities I believe many change advocates are unaware of. Imagine you were on a...
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