Tag Archives: medicare
Our National Fugue State
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 27th March 2010If you opened an umbrella in Times Square you could say you covered New York A sizable portion of the American political class seems to be mired in a prolonged fugue state (code 300.13). Their confusion has led them to the conviction that our nation’s well being will be served by a complex piece of…
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Health Insurance Industry Profits
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 15th September 2009This post was suggested by an article by Mark J. Perry professor of economics at the University of Michigan. In it he lists the profit margins of the top 86 industries in the US. He stops at 86 because that’s the spot occupies by health insurance. If you want to see the complete list you…
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Medicare,The AARP, and Sutton's Law
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 31st August 2009There was a time when Sutton’s law was commonly taught to medical students, but its use has declined as has the notoriety of the bank robber (Willie Sutton) for whom it was named. Sutton is alleged to have said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is; he denied saying this. It’s meaning…
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Put Them Out to Die
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 3rd August 2009Some American Indian tribes are said to have put very old members of their tribe out in the cold to die when they had reached the point where they could no longer contribute anything productive to the group. The Democrats in the Senate apparently share this approach. Mike Enzi (R, Wyo) introduced an amendment that…
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Effectiveness and Cost
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th June 2009There’s a growing sentiment that a solution to out of control medical costs might be to limit reimbursement of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that are deemed to be of little or no effectiveness. I’ve written earlier that this is rationing of medical care in disguise. But let’s look at his issue in a little more…
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The Rashomon Approach to Medicare
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 10th June 2009The May 28 number of the New England Journal of Medicine published three perspective pieces which show how hard it is to discuss anything to do with federal funding of medical care. The authors, all PhDs, were invited to write these articles presumably because they know a lot about the subject. I’ve already stated my…
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Evidence Based Reimbursement
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th June 2009It didn’t take long. The day after I wrote that Evidenced Based Medicine would be used to ration medical care the June 8 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine appeared on my desk. Under the heading of Health Care Reform is “A 300-Year-Old Solution to the Health Care Crisis”. In it Diamond, et al…
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More on Medicare's Administrative Costs
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 2nd June 2009I’ve previously written on how Medicare drastically underestimates its administrative costs. Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,has analyzed these costs a different way and concluded that administrative costs under a single payer scheme would be twice those of today’s health insurance. He doesn’t really count the hidden costs that I was carrying…
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Medicare's Payment of Physicians
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 17th March 2009Every year Congress goes through a Medicare ritual. The law as written requires about a 20% reduction in payments to doctors. Medicare’s rates are already low causing many physicians to refuse new Medicare patients who don’t have supplemental insurance.These physicians usually are the best in each locale; it’s the weakest that stay in the system…
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Life Expectancy, Medicare, and Preventable Death
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 21st February 2009I’ve recently read several articles dealing with the aging of our population. They all said that retired people have to confront the problem of a longer life expectancy. They have to husband their resources to last longer than did previous generations You’ve probably seen similar material. Everybody believes that old people are living a lot…
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