I am not a physician, so have no credentials to be telling the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) how to run hospitals, much less physicians how to treat patients. However, as part of a clinic struggling to get reasonable reimbursement for the care we provide, I can speak directly to the issues about…
I have posted often about the methods insurance companies use to avoid payment on claims, whether it’s the claim submission process itself in “The 1500 and it’s Sidekick the EOB,” or more recently, increasingly novel ways payers use to deny payment in “North Dakota Medicaid and Erectile Dysfunction.” Physicians often complain about the difficulty of…
Rural hospitals are struggling in many areas, in part because the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) designation was created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make rural hospitals band-aid stations. CAH staff is there to triage patients and send most to specialists in metropolitan hospitals. As with many CMS schemes, all the…
“American medicine is probably the best in the world, but they rush too much and do too much unnecessary surgery.” Dr. Bohdran Hordinsky (1991) Having written about the problems with one-doc towns in rural areas, specifically rural North Dakota, I thought it would be helpful to provide an example of how the town…
The United States infant death rate has always been far higher than that in other developed countries. Now researchers are finding that in the United States, the maternal death rate is on the increase while it is going down in other countries. There are many possible reasons for these disturbing numbers. The American Congress of…
