From the monthly archives:

August 2008

Hurricane Gustav blogging

August 31, 2008

Donald J. Palmisano, former president of the AMA, is blogging from New Orleans as he’s trying to leave the city. Follow his ordeal through this tragic time.

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Field of Bariatric Surgery

August 31, 2008
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Classic take: Never say never

August 30, 2008

The following is a reader take by WhiteCoat, originally published on 4/7/2008.
WellPoint and Aetna are now putting into widespread implementation a refusal to pay for what have been deemed “never” events.
The theory for payment denials is that if medical providers are not paid when certain unwanted outcomes occur, situations leading to those unwanted outcomes will [...]

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High Cholesterol

August 30, 2008
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Difference Between Academic vs. Private Practice

August 29, 2008
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Medicare’s dismal pay for performance

August 29, 2008

Their embarrassingly small 1.5% bonus payments have physicians questioning whether the extra record-keeping is worth it:
It took a lot of paperwork and screwed up billing because we had to charge 1 cent per code so that the Medicare carrier’s computer would pick up the charges, and then had to manually write off that charge afterward.
[...]

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Referral patterns

August 29, 2008

A reader writes:
Primary care doctors don’t know all the resources for a given medical problem in their geographical area. They will tend to go to whomever is their acquaintance or on the staff of the hospital that they are on the staff of. I found that two of the leading surgeons in the [...]

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Soft sell

August 29, 2008

DTC drug advertisements are facing increasing scrutiny. To get around this, drug companies are resorting the “unbranded advertising“, where the name of the drug isn’t mentioned in the commercial. This relieves them of the responsibility of listing all the side effects of the medication.
Banning drug companies from advertising medications would be easier.

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Utilization review doctors

August 29, 2008

In California, these doctors are not required to be licensed within the state, and have the power to veto any diagnostic or treatment plan by a patient’s primary physician.
Worse, they cannot be disciplined:
A huge snag in the system is that utilization review doctors without California licenses cannot be disciplined by the Medical Board of California [...]

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Doctor myths

August 29, 2008

Think physicians are rich or overpaid? You should read this.

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Acute mesenteric ischemia

August 29, 2008

Buckeye Surgeon talks about a difficult case. The statistics are not on the patient’s side when they present with this.

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Midwife to the Amish

August 28, 2008

This midwife does about 200 to 300 births a year, at $1,000 per birth.
It doesn’t sound like she worries about malpractice. Is it because the Amish are less likely to sue?

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Compromise

August 28, 2008

Miles Zaremski suggests a compromise to health care reform, blending the ideas from the left and right:
Why not provide a basic layer of health protection for all Americans funded with taxpayer dollars, with any additional coverage paid for by the individual, the employer, or both through the private sector? In this way, every citizen will [...]

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Stiff penalty for Enzyte founder

August 28, 2008

I still have trouble getting those Smiling Bob Enzyte commercials out of my head.
Now the company’s founder is going to be doing some hard time.

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Get ready for the ICD-10 codes

August 28, 2008

The switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes is supposed to happen in 2011.
Providers get to look forward to almost a 10-fold jump in number of codes, but also an increase in claim denials:
HHS is predicting that claims-error rates will rise between 6 and 10 percent of all claims at the ICD-10 implementation date, up [...]

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