Tag: U.S. Health Policy

Posted in Access to healthcare, advance-pricing, Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), CPT billing, Direct-Pay Medicine, Direct-Pay Practice Models, Economic Issues, Free-Market, Government Regulations, Health Insurance, Healthcare financing, Independent Physicians, Medical Costs, medical inflation, out-of-pocket costs, Patient Choice, Policy Issues, Price Tansparency, Uncategorized

Surprise Medical Bills: We Know the Cure…Few Are Using it

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom

This whole issue of “surprise bills” is a symptom of a more pernicious economic disease which has been driving prices in healthcare for decades; that being, a lack on discoverable, actionable meaningful prices for bundled medical services.

Moreover, the lack of transparent/actionable pricing in healthcare is a derivative of the manner in which we have chosen to code, bill and get paid for medical services.

And most of the legislative and regulatory fixes proposed do NOT correct the core problem.

The corollary being, there are no surprise bills when we use real honest pricing strategies!

Dr. Keith Smith and Dr. Steve Lantier

Case in point…you will never have a surprise bill from Surgery Center Of Oklahoma. They publish easily discoverable all-inclusive prices for their surgical procedures. And, they offer same price to any willing buyer, because they aren’t controlled by network contracts.

Price setting or caps is not the correct response to the problem of this form of price gouging. This knee jerk visceral reaction is shortsighted. Price setting ALWAYS distorts markets in negative ways which are not always apparent; shortages or supply chain inefficiencies/interruptions/gaps are inevitable.

It is NOT the cost of medical care & and pharma that is the problem…It is the simultaneous lack of both transparent & actionable prices, combined with using proprietary contractual formulary agreements as a substitute for honest pricing, which has brought us to this dangerous fiscal precipice. Hiding costs by shifting them or redistributing them is same economically illiterate strategy which brought us Obamacare.

We can do better.

Posted in Access to healthcare, DC & Related Shenanigans, Economic Issues, Education, government incompetence, Government Regulations, Health Insurance, Healthcare financing, Influence peddling, Medical Costs, medical inflation, Medicare, News From Washington, Organizational structure, Policy Issues, Reforming Medicaid, Reforming Medicare, Tax Policy, Uncategorized

The History Of U.S. Health Policy Is A History Of Political Exploitation

Posted on by Forum for Healthcare Freedom
Greg Scandlen

By Greg Scandlen

It all began with a concept known as “Roemer’s Law.” If you ask anyone who has studied health economics or health policy in the last 50 years, “What is Roemer’s Law?” each will be able to tell you in an instant: “That means a built bed is a filled bed.”

Milton Roemer, MD, was a researcher and professor, mostly at the University of California-Los Angeles, who spent a lifetime (he died in 2001) advocating for national health systems around the world. He was involved in creating the World Health Organization in 1951 and Saskatchewan’s provincial single-payer system in 1953.  His “law” was based on a single study he did in 1959 that found a correlation between the number of hospital beds per person and the rate of hospital days used per person. That’s it. That is the whole basis for “Roemer’s Law.”

“A built bed is a filled bed.” This little bumper sticker slogan has been the foundation of American health policy for 60 years. Hundreds of laws, massive programs, thousands of regulations at the federal, state, and local levels of government, all have been based on this slogan. It is the source of such concepts as “provider-induced demand,” and has resulted in centralized health planning, Certificate of Need regulations, managed care, and everything else currently on the table. Yet this “law” is both verifiably untrue and illogical.

There is a kernel of truth to it. When third-party payers pick up the tab, the usual tension between buyer and seller doesn’t exist. The buyer has no reason to resist excessive prices if someone else pays the bill.

But the believers in Roemer’s Law take that core idea to Alice-In-Wonderland proportions. They argue that, therefore, whenever a health-care provider wants to make more money, it simply has to sell more — more capacity equals more sales without end. So, the only way to reduce this endless consumption is to limit the capacity — place strict controls on the availability of services. But the notion fails for several reasons:

Source: The History Of U.S. Health Policy Is A History Of Political Exploitation