Tag: "socialized health care"

Teachers Get Free Botox in Buffalo

The Buffalo public school system’s health insurance covers plastic surgery. There is no copay. According to BuffaloNews.com, the cost of the benefit rose from $1 million in 2004 to $9 million in 2009. That was 9 percent of the district’s total spending on health benefits for employees and retirees. According to Jordan Weissmann of The Atlantic, the union has said that it will be happy to drop the benefit in the next round of contract negotiations.

However, Buffalo teachers haven’t bothered to negotiate a new contract since the last one expired in 2004. Thanks to New York State’s Triborough Amendment, they don’t have to. The old contract automatically stays in force until the union reaches a new agreement. As the old agreement has lavish benefits and yearly 2.5% step increases, the union has no incentive to enter into negotiations with a city that receives 48 percent of its revenues with from what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo calls a “functionally bankrupt” state and might, for once, actually be interested in driving a hard bargain.

Jan 27, 2012 | 6 comments | by

Should You and I Pay for Austin’s Daughter’s Asthma Pills?

This is Austin Frakt at The Incidental Economist:

Asthma medication is exactly the type of health product that should be free, or nearly so, especially for low-income families. I cannot imagine many would take the meds for “fun”. I don’t think “skin in the game” causes patients to avoid overuse. All I think it does is risk more asthma attacks and more ER visits, even more deaths…

I’d call breathing a merit good, something we all have a right to enjoy. Let’s not charge people for medication that permits it, particularly if doing so means we’re likely to pay vastly more if they don’t take their meds.

Here is the response I posted:

Austin, on first reading, I thought you were saying that I (as a taxpayer) should help pay for your daughter’s asthma medication — even though you agree that you can afford to pay for it yourself. Disbelief overcame me, so I read your post a second time. Then I read it a third. Each time, the message was as incomprehensible as on the previous reading.

Is there a persuasive reason why I owe the Frakt household something? If so, it’s not in this post.

Dec 05, 2011 | 7 comments | by

Socialized Medicine, Montana Style

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer wants to establish a government-run health care plan in his state, patterned after the program used in Saskatchewan.  He then went on to explain how his government-run system might keep taxpayer spending on health care low:

Chris Jacobs has discovered that “Wait List FAQs” from the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency includes this helpful guidance for cancer patients:

What are you doing to ensure that I get an appointment in a timely way?

Currently we have a shortage of medical oncologists that is impacting our wait times.  We are also actively recruiting to fill our vacant positions throughout our facilities and are working to bring in locums to help address wait times….

Can I get care sooner if I go somewhere else?

You will find that wait times exist in the healthcare system throughout Canada and in other countries as well….

Oct 03, 2011 | 3 comments | by

British EMR Experiment Ends in Failure

While the Obama administration is in the process of spending billions on developing electronic medical records, the British government has concluded that its £12.7 billion national electronic medical records system is a failure and that “there can be no confidence that the programme has delivered or can be delivered as originally conceived.” The Telegraph reports that Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said “Labour’s NHS IT Programme let down the NHS and wasted taxpayers’ money by imposing a top-down IT system on the local NHS, which didn’t fit their needs.”

The two parts that have worked and will be retained have been a part of the U.S. health care landscape for some years. The first is a nationwide NHS email system. The second is Choose and Book. Choose and Book lets patients who have been given a password and a reference number by their primary care physician “choose where [one] goes for your first consultation by comparing the hospitals [one has] been shortlisted at” and book, cancel, or change one’s appointment online as well as by phone.

Sep 30, 2011 | 5 comments | by

Living With a Global Budget

This is the latest news about the British National Health Service:

Family doctors have been ordered to ration the number of patients they send for life-saving cancer scans to save money.

They are being told to slash the number they refer to hospital for tests including ultrasounds, MRIs and CT scans commonly used to spot tumours.

Last night experts warned the cost-saving measures increased the risk of patients being diagnosed too late and dying unnecessarily.

Britain has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in Europe, and experts say late diagnosis is to blame.

Sep 28, 2011 | 4 comments | by

Vending Machines for Prescription Drugs, and Other News

Hospital offers a 24-hour vending machine for prescription drugs.

Government waste discovered by ABC News (great video).

Mayor Rahm Emanuel to Chicago city workers: enroll in a new wellness plan or pay a $50 a month higher premium.

Hospital drug shortages have cost at least 15 deaths. See previous posts here, here, and here.

Sep 23, 2011 | 3 comments | by

The Downside of Japanese Health Care

[P]atients can nearly always see a doctor within a day. But they must often wait hours for a three-minute consultation. Complicated cases get too little attention. The Japanese are only a quarter as likely as the Americans or French to suffer a heart attack, but twice as likely to die if they do.

Some doctors see as many as 100 patients a day. Because their salaries are low, they tend to overprescribe tests and drugs. (Clinics often own their own pharmacies.) They also earn money, hotel-like, by keeping patients in bed. Simple surgery that in the West would involve no overnight stay, such as a hernia operation, entails a five-day hospital stay in Japan.

Emergency care is often poor. In lesser cities it is not uncommon for ambulances to cruise the streets calling a succession of emergency rooms to find one that can cram in a patient. In a few cases people have died because of this. One reason for a shortage of emergency care is an abundance of small clinics instead of big hospitals. Doctors prefer them because they can work less and earn more.

Full article on Japanese health care here.

Sep 20, 2011 | 4 comments | by

Many of the ACA Quality-Enhancing Ideas Have Previously Failed

One of the many pilot projects of health reform is to reduce the number of readmissions within 30 days of Medicare patients discharged from a hospital. The problem: it’s already been tried by the VA Health Administration and failed to lower the number of readmissions, according to a report in The Washington Post.

The Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated health care system in the country, has long employed many of the approaches Medicare is pushing on all hospitals to reduce unnecessary readmissions. But new data show VA hospital patients are just as likely to end up back in a hospital bed as are patients at private hospitals. The new statistics underscore how hard it may be for hospitals to stop patients from rebounding back through their doors, a major goal of Medicare as it seeks to curtail the nation’s ballooning health costs.

HT: Kaiser Health News

Sep 14, 2011 | 3 comments | by

NHS Nurses Wear “Do Not Disturb” Uniforms

This report on the British National Health Service is from the Daily Mail:

A row has broken out over a hospital trust’s decision to give nurses ‘Do Not Disturb’ uniforms to wear during routine ward duties to prevent patients from speaking to them…

The hospital says interruptions, such as patients asking questions about toilets and meal times, stop nurses from doing their jobs properly and could lead to patients being given the wrong medication.

Bitter pill to follow: Ward manager Penny Searle wears the controversial tabard during a drug round.

Aug 30, 2011 | 7 comments | by

Canadian Health Care: Free But Unavailable

So I used the Health Care Options Directory on the same government website. This allows you to plug in your postal code and find all family doctors listed within a certain radius. It is a particularly soul-destroying experience.

The opening page lists no names or phone numbers, just the number of doctors at each address. It takes more clicks to get the contact information. And after you go through those steps and make the calls, you find that none of the doctors are accepting patients.

I phoned all 84 doctors who were listed as practising within 10 kilometres of my home. Some of their receptionists were polite. Some were surly. All rejected me.

But for $3,000 you can find a doctor at the drop of a hat! Editorial here. HT: David Henderson.

Aug 23, 2011 | 10 comments | by
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