The healthcare mess just seems to be growing into a what appears to be a bigger and bigger train wreck bound to happen, fueled by the ridiculously black-and-white mentality of partisan politics, all whipped together into a froth of total uselessness by this being an election year. After the election, the political nonsense continues. Where…
Patient access to their own health care data has snagged center stage for some time. Now there is a movement to make lab tests directly available to patients. Sure, patients like to get phone calls from their practitioner’s nurse about the results of their lab tests, even if those tests are normal. In our area,…
The fear of vaccinations for children has been with the U.S. health care system for many years. Indeed, Michael C. Dorf reminds us: “Skepticism of orthodox medicine has deep roots in American constitutional culture.” We all know anyone can read all manner of misinformation on the Internet. Medea personalities support all manner of causes, including refraining…
Patients should be able to ask their clinics how much a patient visit costs, but patients should also be encourgaged to put the price of a clinic visit in context. Patients are often unaware of what actually happens to that clinic visit charge as it passes through the various paths to payment. This conversation with…
In my previous post, I talked about the problems with using “evidence-based” medicine to constrain patient care and avoid dealing with the complexity of health care decisions. Physicians are perfectly capable of dealing with the complexity of their patients’ medical problems, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) believe if care can’t…
