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HEALTHPLANUSA . NET |
QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER |
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Community For Affordable Health Care |
Vol V, No 1, April, 2006 |
Utilizing the $1.4 Trillion Information Technology Industry
To Transform the $1.7 Trillion HealthCare Industry into
Affordable HealthCare
In This Issue:
1. Featured
Article: Poison Pill – The Atlantic Monthly
2. In the News: You Can Be Too Careful - Reason
4. Governmental
Health Plans: A View As To What’s In Store for America
5. Lean
HealthCare: How the NHS Achieves Lean Health Care – Close Hospitals
6. Medical
Myths: HealthCare is Free in France and Germany
7. Overheard on
Capital Hill: Goodbye to Goldwater - Reason
9. Health Plan
USA: A Work in Progress
* * * * *
1. Feature
Article: First Principles: Poison
Pill, by Clive Crook
Big, politically ugly changes to
In every rich country, it
seems, people expect too much of their health-care systems. That is why, in
their different ways, they are disappointed—and why they always will be.
Citizens everywhere desire unrestricted access to state-of-the-art
technologies. Increasingly, they insist on choice and control, too. Yet they
are unwilling to pay what those things cost. People demand as a right the best
health care money can buy, delivered in the way that best suits them, expense
be damned. All that, and the price must be affordable.
Nowhere can this self-contradictory demand be
satisfied. Everywhere, therefore, health care presents itself to governments as
their most difficult nonsecurity challenge. In the
Consider
this: the government increases its spending on
Medicare by tens of billions of dollars a year (as the administration did with
its recent prescription-drug reform) and the beneficiaries are up in
arms about it. Yes, the execution of the scheme was botched. Still, where else
could generosity on such a scale actually arouse hostility, to say nothing of
its apparent failure to buy votes? When Americans are asked what they think
about health care, most say they like the quality of service (the government
must do nothing to compromise those high standards); they also complain that
health care is far too costly (the government must act).
Wherever
you look, you find no plainly superior system. Countless variants—from the
mainly government-run, single-provider, single-payer model at one extreme to
Of
course, the world's national health systems have more in common than you might
think. Almost all of them are hybrids, mixing public and private. In statist
Here
is a basic principle: if costs are to be better controlled, some medical
services must be either forgone or denied. The key question: Who decides?
Top-down rationing—as in
In
the
This
enormous extra cost doubtless saves or significantly improves many lives. It
supports a remarkable pace of innovation. And nothing is wrong in principle
with a country spending proportionally more of its income on health care as it
gets richer. But the system includes plenty of waste. It delivers services that
cost more to provide than they would be worth to the patient if the patient
were paying. And millions of Americans with low-paying jobs have no insurance:
their employer does not provide it, they cannot afford to buy their own, and
they are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. So
The
administration and the economists it listens to want to control costs by
mobilizing consumers. If the tax advantage for employer-provided insurance were
removed or offset, and if more people bought their own policies, Americans
would lean more toward plans with low premiums and plenty of cost-sharing (high
deductibles and high co-payments). In this way, health insurance would be more
like real insurance—a protection against serious financial risk—and less akin
to a utility payment plan. Patient-consumers would have the incentive they lack
at present to force costs down. The administration has proposed some reforms
with this notion in mind.
This
kind of approach draws two objections—one largely false (though widely
advanced), the other valid. The false objection is that patients are too
ignorant to be intelligent consumers of medical services. It is all too
complicated, this argument goes. Necessary health expenditures would be cut as
well as unnecessary ones. Some even question whether there is any such thing as
an unnecessary health expenditure. It is not as though
people go to the doctor for fun, they point out; people do it only when they
have to. If you restrict access by directly confronting people with the costs,
their health will suffer.
Well,
such evidence as there is says that when patients have to pay a direct share of
health-care costs, they do buy fewer medical
services—but also that the effect of this on health outcomes is small. This was
the principal finding of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment of the 1970s and
early 1980s, still the largest health-policy study ever conducted in the
Patients,
given a reason, buy wisely. Is that so surprising? The truth is, buyers are at
an informational disadvantage to sellers almost every time a deal—any deal—is struck.
But they understand this, do their homework (if the transaction justifies the
effort), and find ways of mitigating the problem, whether they are buying a
car, a home, a college education, or an operation to remove a mole. Health-care
professionals have a vested interest (15 percent of the gross domestic
product) in insisting that health is special. In this respect it is not, or at
any rate not as different as the argument implies. In all likelihood, making
The
whole thing is political poison, of course, but as costs keep rising, something
will eventually have to give. The present system is on course to be
unaffordable and to let too many people down, and the closer you get to the
single-payer socialized alternative, the less appealing it looks.
Consumer-driven health care, supplemented with generous subsidies for those
with low incomes, is at least worth a try.
To read the
article, (subscription required) go to www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200604/crook.
Any Entitlement Is Permanent Because It Is A
Poison Pill That Congress Won’t Swallow
* * * * *
2. In
the News: You
Can Be Too Careful by Brian Doherty
How the government’s new
corporate accounting rules impede efficiency and stifle innovation – Reason
Adelphia founder John Rigas got 15
years (a life sentence for the 80-year-old executive), and former WorldCom CEO
Bernard Ebbers got 25—two victories in the government’s post-Enron wave of corporate
fraud prosecutions. Meanwhile, the Enron case itself has crawled along, with
few significant victories and a handful of defeats for federal prosecutors. The
trials of former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, president
Jeffrey Skilling, and chief accounting officer
Richard Causey are set to begin in January.
New laws were not necessary to prosecute those
executives. Still, Congress responded to the scandals that destroyed or hobbled
their companies by passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Signed into law by President
George W. Bush on
Sarbanes-Oxley, a.k.a. SarbOx,
is a complicated law that has the business world abuzz with annoyance and
anxiety. Among other things, it requires that CEOs and chief financial officers
certify, under penalty of 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines, that
their internal financial controls are in order and that they lead to accurate
reports. It says executives must provide “reasonable assurance” that everything
is kosher, a provision that is likely to invite litigation as well as
prosecution. The law created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board,
adding yet another level of oversight to a profession already monitored by the
Securities and Exchange Commission, the Fair Accounting Standards Board, and
the Justice Department. The board is ostensibly private, but has the power to
force accounting firms to pay both fees for its operations, and fines for
disobeying its edicts. SarbOx also requires that
auditors (though not necessarily auditing firms) switch out every five years,
and it prohibits auditors from jumping ship to executive positions at companies
they have just audited.
Critics in academia and business journalism—and many
from the corporate world itself, most of whom are reluctant to talk on the
record and thereby show “bad faith” regarding the law—have many complaints
about SarbOx, from its picayune requirements to its
overall cost. While all such guesstimates should be taken with a grain of salt,
one financial consulting firm, the Johnsson Group,
has put the 2004 costs of SarbOx compliance at $15
billion. The critics also argue that the law’s benefits are apt to be small. .
. .
SarbOx probably won’t cripple the American economy, any more
than the Clean Air Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act did. But it’s
bound to create bad incentives and unintended consequences. Far from increasing
the efficiency of capital markets, it will discourage some businesses from
going public, since most of its provisions do not apply to privately held
companies; will encourage some now-public companies to go private; and will
keep some foreign companies out of the U.S. stock market.
According to a survey of companies with under $1
billion in annual revenue done by national law firm Foley and Lardner, SarbOx has more than tripled the average annual regulatory
costs of being a public company in the
The costs of SarbOx
compliance, while not driving anyone out of business, will siphon revenues
toward legal and accounting work. That drain may, in the words of Forbes’ Rich Karlgaard, “succeed in stopping the next Enron,
but…crib-kill the next Cisco, Microsoft and Starbucks” by leaving them less
capital with which to expand.
To get a better sense of how Sarbanes-Oxley is
affecting American businesses, Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty asked
four people familiar with the law’s consequences to explain what the new rules
mean in practice. . . .
As a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance consultant, Stephen
Stanton is a man whose self-interest should encourage him to praise the law.
But he sees little good coming from it, aside from added income for consultants
and auditors.
Charles Wilson is chairman of the board of Trio-Tech
International, a California-based semiconductor testing company with about 500
employees and a market capitalization of $12 million.
To read the other responses
and the entire original article, please go www.reason.com/0601/fe.bd.you.shtml.
Congress Has
Placed Another Roadblock To An Innovative Market Based
Health Plan.
* * * * *
3. International Medicine: In The NHS The Maximum Waiting Period Of Six Months Becomes The “Minimum Waiting Period” To Save
Money.
It's
the doctors' fault the NHS is in financial trouble, says Hewitt
By Melissa Kite and Beezy Marsh (Filed:
Patricia Hewitt blamed doctors for holding up
National Health Service improvement yesterday as she announced that hospitals
are to be rated on their financial performance.
The Health Secretary said part of the problem
facing the health service was "clinical resistance" to change.
Tomorrow a Government watchdog the Healthcare
Commission will announce a two-tier rating system that will see hospitals given
separate scores for clinical care and management of resources.
The Sunday Telegraph can also reveal that NHS
staff may have their pay rises delayed by the Government to help to ease the
financial crisis in the NHS. Sources said the Treasury and Department of Health
were considering a "staged" pay award, which would allow them to put
off payment until later in the year.
An announcement on the pay deal for 2006-7 was
postponed last week following the departure of the NHS chief executive Sir
Nigel Crisp after it emerged that debt is likely to top £800 million this year.
More evidence of the worsening situation came
yesterday when Eastbourne Downs primary care trust
ordered the town's hospital not to operate on any patient who had not been
waiting six months, the maximum allowed, making it the latest to introduce in
effect a "minimum waiting time" to save money.
Ms Hewitt said the best hospitals were those
where "you have got the clinicians and the managers working well
together". She said: "Behind every good clinical team is a good
manager. Patient care goes hand in hand with good finance." . . .
Ms Hewitt appeared to acknowledge there was a
problem with pay. She said: "It's been clear for a while that 'Agenda For
Change' and the new GP contracts are all costing us rather more than we
anticipated." . . .
The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has already told
the Pay Review Body - the independent body that makes recommendations on NHS
pay - that he wants awards to be capped at two per cent this year, just above
inflation.
The British Medical Association is seeking a
minimum pay rise of 4.5 per cent for doctors this year.
To read the entire article, please go to www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nhs12.xml
* * * * *
4. Governmental Health Plans: A
View As To What’s In Store For
Botched operation
By Ross Clark, Melissa Kite and Beezy
Marsh, (Filed:
Patricia
Hewitt was confined to barracks as news of the parlous state of NHS finances
swept
A
meticulously composed minister, Ms Hewitt was making the most of an unenviable
task: how to explain to journalists why health service deficits were running at
a record £800 million and why Sir Nigel Crisp, the chief executive, had just
taken "early retirement".
Three-hundred
miles away in
The
trust's other main hospital, the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, had just
written to 200 patients to warn that their operations were to be postponed as
part of an attempt to solve a cash shortage of £8.1 million this financial
year.
For
Cornwall's sick and infirm, more delays and cancellations in treatment inevitably
lie ahead and it is the same story across the country, where dozens of small
hospitals have either been closed or earmarked for closure, wards have been
mothballed and training slashed.
Had
this been happening against a background of Government cuts it might be easier
to understand. Yet, money has been lavished on the NHS
in recent years. Since Gordon Brown announced in his 2002 Budget that he was
putting a penny on National Insurance to fund health spending, the NHS budget
has risen from £65 billion to £87 billion, an increase in real terms of 7.5 per
cent a year. British health spending - NHS and private health - has grown rapidly
from 7 per cent of GDP in 1997/98, and is on course to reach the 9.8 per cent
of GDP spent by the French by 2008.
So
where has all the extra money gone? Much of it, according to the King's Fund,
the independent think-tank, has gone into the pockets of doctors and nurses. In
2004/05, the fund claims, an extra £5.086 billion was spent on hospital and
community health services (ie most NHS expenditure
excluding GPs' surgeries), a 12.4 per cent rise on the year before. Yet, of
this hefty increase, a mere 2.4 per cent found its way into new beds and extra
operations. A massive 27 per cent went on pay rises and 29 per cent was spent
on "rebasing" the pensions of NHS staff, effectively shifting the
liability from the Treasury to the NHS.
According
to Laura Mason, of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals' Trust, new consultants'
contracts have added £1 million to the wage bill this year, and Agenda for
Change, which established national pay scales for nursing and other staff, has
added a further £2.5 million. The trust's funding from
Ms
Hewitt went on to blame "clinical resistance" to change among some
doctors, echoing Tony Blair's remark in a speech in 1999 that he had
"scars on my back" from attempting to reform health.
She
cited the case of John Petri, an Italian orthopaedic
surgeon who has spent most of his career in
While
he operated in one theatre, another patient was prepared in a second. He moved
on to the second patient, leaving a junior to finish the first. By the time the
second operation was nearing completion, a third patient was waiting for him in
the original theatre. The system enabled him to perform up to five hip and knee replacements in a shift, compared with one or
two carried out by surgeons who use one theatre. Yet it faltered, said Ms
Hewitt, because "other surgeons in that hospital were not particularly
keen to adopt the same practice".
Ms
Hewitt's complaint certainly won't wash with surgeons down at the
Indeed,
the very introduction of PCTs, has played a part in the financial debacle. Inspired by
World Health Organisation dogma that health care is best
administered through public bodies that cover about 100,000 people, PCTs were supposed to provide a missing element of localism
into the bloated monolith that is the NHS. Instead, they have managed to upset
more local people than a
West
Suffolk PCT, for example, has proposed the closure of two hospitals in
One
thing is sure: the Public Finance Initiative (PFI) deals which have been used
to construct many new hospitals are not going to save money. The
When,
in 2008, spending matches that of the French health service, you can be sure
that Ms Hewitt, if she is still in office, will herald it as a great success.
Nurses and doctors will be happily spending their extra wages. Whether we will
really be healthier for it all, or whether the rapid increase in NHS spending
is based on a false premise that more money equals better health, is another
matter.
To read the entire article, please go to
www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nhs112.xml.
* * * * *
5. Lean HealthCare: How The NHS Achieves Lean Health Care –
Close Hospitals
Christopher Booker's notebook (Filed:
Hospitals must go, to pay for the
managers to close them
Two
weeks ago today, when I went for a cataract operation at a small community
hospital in Westbury, Wiltshire, I little realised I
was walking into the centre of a major national scandal. Originally referred to
a large general hospital, I had been told the operation might not be possible
for a year. On questioning this, I was told that if I went to the special eye
unit at Westbury, I could be fitted in just two weeks later.
Arriving
at the hospital's clean modern buildings on a Sunday afternoon, I was so struck
by the friendly atmosphere and the speed and efficiency with which the
operation was completed that I observed that Westbury seemed an absolute model
of everything the NHS should be. I was then told that, thanks to a shock
decision by West Wiltshire Primary Care Trust (PCT), the hospital was being
closed down - starting the following week with the removal of its 12 elderly
in-patients. The rest of its wide range of services would soon follow.
What
made this decision incomprehensible, as Westbury's MP Dr Andrew Murrison pointed out when he raised it in Parliament, was
that it flies right in the face of Patricia Hewitt's recent White Paper on
community care. Not only had Mrs Hewitt stated that "community hospitals
should be retained if needed and wanted by the communities they serve",
she urged "Primary Care Trusts to rethink their closure plans,
particularly when they were being put forward as a cost-saving measure.
Community facilities should not be lost in response to short-term budgetary
pressures".
But
Westbury is far from alone. Such is the spate of closures and cutbacks taking
place all over the country, in a bid to reduce the NHS's
current £800 million deficit, that some 90 of our 350 community hospitals are
threatened, according to Chant (Community Hospitals Acting Nationally
Together), a body formed to fight the closures. In
What
makes this truly scandalous are the reasons for the closures. Since 1999 the
Government has almost doubled its NHS spending, from £40 billion to £76
billion. But 80 per cent of this additional money has gone, not on expanding
health care, but on a massive inflation in salaries (with many GPs now said to
be earning £125,000 a year); on the increased cost of drugs and compensation
claims; and on the soaring cost of interest on PFI building schemes.
One
of the biggest increases has been the 66 per cent rise in the number of health
service "managers", in what is now said to be the third-largest
state-run organisation in the world, after the
Chinese army and the Indian railways. Yet it is these bureaucrats who are
deciding to close down nearly a quarter of our community hospitals, to meet a
deficit which has resulted not least from their own recruitment: precisely the
"short-term budgetary pressures" which Mrs Hewitt insists must not be
made an excuse for closing community hospitals.
[In]
Westbury where, last Sunday, in what was described as a "dawn raid",
the remaining in-patients, elderly and confused, were summarily removed from
their beds, without breakfast, to be sent to other hospitals. Only one remained
- Mena Rising, terminally ill with cancer and too
weak to be moved. She died on Thursday.
Such
inhumanity should prompt Mrs Hewitt to intervene now, to halt a disaster which
makes such a mockery of her fine but, it seems, empty words.
To read the original article, go to www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nbook12.xml.
* * * * *
6. Medical Myths: HealthCare is Free in
More doctors, but care isn't free for the
French and Germans (Filed:
Public health is financed from taxes and
compulsory social-health insurance contributions from employers and employees.
Tax is "ring-fenced" from pay packets and paid into the national health service budget.
Compulsory sickness insurance funds cover 99 per
cent of the population. People are affiliated to a health-insurance scheme on
the basis of their professional status and place of residence. The insurers are
non-government, non-profit agencies and employers pay a premium for them.
Seventy per cent of a person's health-care costs
are covered by social security. To cover the remaining 30 per cent, they pay
their "mutuelle", an annual premium
equivalent to £1,500 per year that guarantees them a single room in hospital.
Employers bear a heavy part of the cost.
Patient contributions are taken for visits to
the GP, which costs about £13 up front but with 70 per cent of the cost
refunded. Prescriptions are also paid for but up to 65 per cent of the cost is
refunded by the state.
Dental care is not covered by the public health
scheme.
There are about 450 so-called sickness funds, or
public-health insurance companies, which the employee and employer must pay
into to fund
Contributions are shared equally between the
insured and their employers. The average contribution rate is 13.5 per cent, so
the employee will contribute 6.75 per cent out of their pre-tax income and the
employer will pay the same amount in addition to wages.
Everyone has the right to choose which fund they
want to join. . .
To read the entire article, please go to www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nhs412.xml.
* * * * *
7. Overheard on Capital Hill: Goodbye to
Goldwater
Rick Santorum’s Republican
crusade for big government. By Jonathan Rauch for Reason – Free Minds and Free
Markets
In 1960 a
Republican senator from
Rick Santorum, a
second-term Republican senator from
Above all, it is worth
noticing because, like Goldwater’s Conscience, it lays down a marker. As
Goldwater repudiated Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, so Santorum
repudiates Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It’s now official: Philosophically, the
conservative movement has split. Post-Santorum, tax cutting and court bashing
cannot hold the Republican coalition together much longer.
As a policy
book, It Takes a Family is temperate. It offers a healthy reminder that
society needs not just good government but strong civil and social
institutions, and that the traditional family serves essential social
functions. Government policies, therefore, should respect and support family
and civil society instead of undermining or supplanting them. Parents should
make quality time at home a high priority. Popular culture should comport
itself with some sense of responsibility and taste . .
Goldwater and Reagan, and Madison and
Jefferson, were saying that if you restrain government, you will strengthen
society and foster virtue. Santorum is saying something more like the reverse:
If you shore up the family, you will strengthen the social fabric and
ultimately reduce dependence on government . . .
To read the
entire article, please go to www.reason.com/0512/cr.jr.goodbye.shtml.
* * * * *
8. What's in Store for
What can be done to aid the recovery of
the [NHS] system? (Filed:
John Appleby
The chief economist for the think-tank, the King's Fund, a charity that
works to improve health care through research and policy analysis
"The NHS needs to look at how long patients
actually mind waiting for their operations. It has achieved a target of maximum
waits of six months, but now has a new target of 18 weeks' waiting by 2008.
That could be very difficult to achieve.
"With the current financial situation, we
may have to see patients waiting up to the maximum six-month limit in order to
save money for the NHS. The Department of Health is going to have to start
thinking about relaxing some of the targets it has set the NHS."
Josie Irwin
The head of employment relations at the Royal
"The Government needs to look at what has
happened to the NHS and put the pieces of the jigsaw together to solve the
current financial problems.
"The NHS has been stretched to the limit by
a range of Government initiatives without the capacity to fulfil
them. It's an issue of not getting to grips with finance before launching new
schemes.
"There is a hugely expensive new computer
system, which has been fraught with difficulties, spiralling
drug costs and private finance initiatives to build new hospitals, which have
locked the NHS into debts for years to come.
"Restructuring the NHS needs to be thought
out carefully so that we don't face another round of upheaval in another year
or two. How much is it costing the taxpayer to recruit all these new boards and
chairmen?"
Dr Jonathan Fielden
The deputy chairman of the British Medical Association consultants' committee
"There has to be an appreciation that there
is a limited amount of money in the NHS, so it can't all be delivered 'now'.
"When politicians impose a significant
number of targets to be delivered in unreasonable time scales, things start to
fall down. We are already stumbling into a situation where the only way to sort
out the NHS is the blunt tool of finance.
"There are no easy answers on how to 'fix'
the NHS. That means the time is right now for a proper public debate, led by
the profession, about what we actually want from the NHS for the next 15 to 20
years."
To read what others are saying and the rest of
the article, please go to www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nhs212.xml.
The
entire NHS debate seems to be about finance, bean counting, even from the
physicians and the BMA. Isn’t anyone even thinking about the suffering and
dying patients and their needs? Why do we allow government to hurt our patients
and destroy healthcare?
* * * * *
9. Health Plan
Our feature
article this quarter, by Clive Crook in The Atlantic Monthly, gives an
excellent overview of health care in this country and the world. Things are really
in a shambles, essentially throughout the world. Many hold up the National
Health Service or the Canadian Medicare as a goal for the
Also, our
correspondent in
The father of government social
insurance, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck,
observed how Napoleon III used state pensions to buy support for his regime
when he was Ambassador to
When social insurance began to include our health care, we
essentially became slaves to the state. Slavery was a difficult problem in our
country in the past, but we finally prevailed. Will we prevail in freeing
humankind from the medical slavery imposed by the state?
That is our purpose in life. We welcome you to the mission of
freedom in medicine.
* * * * *
10. Doctors
Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice by Non Participation in Insurance
and Government Programs
- John and
Alieta Eck, MDs, for their first-century solution to twenty-first century needs. With
46 million people in this country uninsured, we need an innovative
solution apart from the place of employment and apart from the government.
To read the rest of the story, go to www.zhcenter.org. Stay tuned for their
next innovative move in designing the healthcare system for the entire
country of
- Michael
J. Harris, MD - www.northernurology.com - an active member in the
American Urological Association, Association of American Physicians and
Surgeons, Societe' Internationale D'Urologie, has an active cash'n carry
practice in urology in Traverse City, Michigan. He has no contracts, no
Medicare, no Medicaid, no HIPAA, just patient care. Dr Harris is also
nationally recognized for his medical care system reform initiatives. To
understand that Medical Bureaucrats and Administrators are basically
Medical Illiterates telling the experts how to practice medicine, be sure
to savor his article on "Administrativectomy: The Cure For Toxic
Bureaucratosis" at www.northernurology.com/articles/healthcarereform/administrativectomy.html.
·
PRIVATE NEUROLOGY is a Third-Party-Free
Practice in
- PATMOS
EmergiClinic - where Robert Berry, MD,
an emergency physician and internist states: "Our point-of-care
payment clinic makes acute and chronic primary medical care affordable to
the uninsured of our community by refusing to accept any insurance (along
with the hassles and crushing overhead that inevitably come with it). Read the rest of the story at www.emergiclinic.com.
- Dr Vern
Cherewatenko has success in restoring private-based medical practice that has
grown internationally through the SimpleCare
model network. Dr Vern calls his practice PIFATOS – Pay In Full At Time Of Service, the “Cash-Based Revolution.”
The patient pays in full before leaving. Because doctor charges are
anywhere from 25 – 50 percent inflated due to administrative costs caused
by the health insurance industry, you’ll be paying drastically reduced
rates for your medical expenses. In conjunction with a regular
catastrophic health insurance policy to cover extremely costly procedures,
PIFATOS can save the average healthy adult and/or family up to $5000/year!
To read the rest of the story, go to www.simplecare.com.
- Dr.
Nimish Gosrani has set up a blend between concierge medicine and a cash-only
practice. “Patients can pay $600 a year, plus $10 per visit, to see him as
many times in a year as they want. He offers a financing plan through a
financing company for those unable to plop down $600 all at once.”
Patients may also see him on a simple fee-for-service basis, with fees
ranging from $70 for a simple office visit to $300 for a comprehensive
physical. Dr. Gosrani reports that he saves two hours per day that he used
to spend dealing with insurance company paperwork. To read more, go to http://cgi.photobooks.com/scripts/troll.cgi?dbase=moses&page=2&setsize=10&practice=Nimish+C.+Gosrani%2C+MD&pict_id=2001670.
- Dr.
Elizabeth Vaughan is another
* * * * *
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Del Meyer
Del Meyer, MD, CEO & Founder
HealthPlanUSA, LLC
Words
of Wisdom
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970): I have come to the conclusion that politics
are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Plato (427 – 347 BC): One of the penalties for refusing to
participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Some
Recent Postings
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reviews, please go to www.delmeyer.net/CinematicOpEdReviews.htm.
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This
Month in History
April begins with the day that all Jokesters love, April
Fools Day – the day when practical jokesters go to town. Aquariums receive
a lot of phone calls for Mr Fish, salt and sugar gets switched, quarters are
glued to the sidewalk, and improbable tales are told with a straight face.
It was no joke that on this day in 1789, the
And it was not a
laughing matter, that on this date in 1863,
the First Wartime Conscription Law went into effect in our nation, which
was built by volunteer enlistees.