Health and Sanity category archive

The newest thing in the health care industrial complex: Dropping health care coverage for employees’ spouses.

From MarketWatch:

“We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner’s employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. “We have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we’re trying to do is level the playing field here,” he says.

It’s almost as if, by stripping folks of health coverage, they are trying to make single-payer inevitable.

Doing so would actually benefit businesses, by spreading the costs more equitably across the population, even as the insurance bonus babies and for-profit hospital czars would scream about losing all those juicy bonuses and country club memberships.

At the Bangor Daily News, Philip Caper notices that the phasing in of the Affordable Care Act is drawing new attention to the price of health care in the United States. A nugget:

As (economist George–ed.) Akerlof predicted, the medical-industrial complex is becoming increasingly corrupt. It is now one of our largest and most profitable industries. Much (but not all) of what it is doing is legal, but it has lost its moorings and is forgetting about its health care mission in the pursuit of profits and growth.

The MBAs have taken over. We are all paying the price.

Read the rest.

Alan Grayson once famously said that the Republican health care plan consisted of “Don’t get sick. If you do, die quickly.”

That seems a fitting lead in to this.

It something for others to do.

In a desperate effort to undermine the law they hate, Obamacare, Republican governors and state legislatures in half the states have either rejected or intend to reject a key part of the president’s signature domestic initiative – namely, billions in federal dollars to extend Medicaid coverage to their poorest citizens. While Republicans argue they are acting out of highminded fiscal rectitude, the reality speaks to something else altogether – petulance and hyper-partisanship.

Accepting billions in federal dollars and expanding care to the uninsured would mean tacitly accepting the reality of Obamacare. And that is tantamount to treason in the Republican party. So, as a result, when the law goes into full effect next year, millions of Americans will be left on the outside looking in, denied coverage for no other reason than the misfortune of residing in a red state.

Cut through the rhetoric and the lies.

What it means is that the Republican Party does not want you to have affordable health care.

Via C&L.

For the first time in San Jose and just the third time in the state, the California Dental Association operated a free dental clinic to anyone willing to wait, marshaling more than 1,700 volunteers — including 800 dentists, hygienists and lab assistants.

More than 2,000 people, many traveling by BART and bus from the East Bay and beyond, waited for hours on end. Some arrived as

Their swollen jaws, painful grimaces and reluctant smiles gave them away.

“I’ve been in line since 5 a.m., and I’m not leaving,” said Carrie Flores, 49, of San Jose, who was hoping a dentist inside the cavernous tent building behind the San Jose McEnery Convention Center would extract two or three of her back teeth and maybe save another. She’s been in so much pain she can’t sleep or eat any solid food.

Also, pigs, wings.

Just read this.

It defies summary or excerpt.

PoliticalProf offers a fable about how we establish the cost of health care.

It has a moral, but not morals.

Via The Daily Banter.

Robyn Blumner reflects on Time Magazine’s recent article on hospital costs (paywall). A nugget:

Brill’s excellent 25,000-word expose, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” sheds light on this opaque world where even nonprofit hospitals, with their tax exemptions and do-gooder images, are profit-generating machines that mercilessly squeeze uninsured patients until they have no assets left.

In nonprofit hospitals where top executives often are paid lavish compensation of $1 million or more, Brill documents how patients are gouged, charged hundreds of dollars for X-rays and other services that Medicare would have reimbursed at little more than $20. In one typical case, a dose of life-saving cancer medicine, already expensive at $4,000, was marked up by the hospital to $13,700 — with no explanation given.

It’s the free market* at work.

Except that, in this case, it’s a seller’s market, so the magickal mystickal competition fairy need not apply.

________________

*AKA, “oligarchy.”

Americablog:

An increasing number of employers are cutting health insurance for spouses. Thankfully, the numbers are still quite small, but the increasing numbers of spouses being dropped should be reason for concern.

Besides record corporate profits, the insurance companies have been doing quite well also — but this move suggests they want even higher profit margins, since spouses who are not working tend to use health insurance more.

The only thing “insurance” companies want to ensure is executives’ country club memberships.

In case you wondered why television is littered with ads for products you can’t buy without a doctor’s order, Barnum had the answer: There’s one born every minute.

More than a third of doctors said they prescribe brand name drugs simply because patients ask for them even when cheaper generics would be appropriate, according to a new study.

The practice, which can contribute to higher health care costs, was found to be more likely among doctors who received free drug samples or free food from drug companies or who had financial relationships with drug companies.

A doctor began to wonder where his patients were getting their outlandish ideas about supplements and miracle cures.

He dared to look behind the curtain and found himself in a TV wonderland.

To understand where his patients were getting their health advice, Charlap began watching the program. “I was shocked that someone with his credentials — someone who apparently still operates on patients and therefore must still be fully cognizant of a physician’s first priority, which is to do no harm — would be recommending all types of different pills, many that had never undergone rigorous scientific scrutiny, as miracle cures or magic pills to a very susceptible audience.”

Much more at the link.

Your for-profit hospitals are at work, demonstating how competition lowers prices.

A nugget from a long story in the Charlotte Observer:

North Carolina patients are likely to pay more for routine health care if their doctors are employed by a hospital, an investigation by the Observer and the News & Observer of Raleigh has found.

It’s true for services ranging from heart tests to routine office visits. And it’s part of a national shift that experts say is raising costs but not quality.

Hospitals are increasingly buying doctors’ practices, then sending bills for routine services that are significantly higher than those charged by independent doctors.

Just gotta pay for those country club memberships so the hospital administrators can get their exercise.

We need single payer.

Susan comments on the Zuckerboard:

So many Facebooks. So little substance.