The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is constantly coming up with ways to cut payments to physicians in the name of improving health care quality. We had PQRS, then Meaningful Use. Statistical studies have shown that these attempts to reduce payments to physicians under the guise of improving the quality of care have…
It’s hard enough to get an appointment with a primary care physician, but when that primary care physician recommends your seeing a specialist, getting that appointment can get dicey. But what happens in the emergency room (ER)? Thus my interest in the recent Idaho Supreme Court decision Morrison v. St. Luke’s RMC. A patient was…
The novice-to-expert yellow brick road has been examined form many perspectives, including the nursing perspective. Having been pretty hard on nurses in “There is a Nursing Shortage—NOT,” I feel compelled to give the profession credit for its awareness that novice nurses are not as proficient as expert nurses, and the profession’s attempt to get a…
There’s a lot of talk, much of it really nasty, about how physicians overcharge patients by providing numerous unneeded services to pad their bills. It’s time to stop using physicians as scapegoats for this country’s obscenely expensive health care. Physician salaries account for 10 percent of this country’s health care costs. Physicians have very little…
The rural healthcare landscape is tremendously varied. For the many physicians practicing in metropolitan areas, I suspect it is hard to imagine practicing in an environment in which you are the only physician within a 50-100 mile radius. You may have NPs and PAs to assist you in seeing patients and cover some of…
