Quick Hits
You would think a former professor of Constitutional law would be a bit embarrassed by signing in law a bill of attainder, especially when it is based on dodgy “evidence”. [If it is good enough standard to start wars, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this.] From Digby.
Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald Leader drew a cartoon which neatly encapsulates the argument against limiting greenhouse gases. From McClatchy.
The Senate has put on a virtuoso display of missing the point, and total incompetence by creating a health care bill that allows insurance companies to limit coverage in a provision that is supposed to outlaw the practice, and has created a bill to control health care costs that will raise those costs. From MSNBC.
I have been tied up dealing with the medical/insurance industry for someone else. The insurance hasn’t been any problem at all because it is Medicare and Tricare. The problems have all been with the “electronic billing systems” used by doctors, pharmacies, and medical equipment suppliers. At one point of frustration I told the person at the medical equipment supplier that I would be more than happy to just pay cash, and the woman looked at me nearly in tears and said “Please don’t make me do a cash transaction, it’s pure hell!”
6 comments
Streamlining individual providers, hospitals, doctors, and practitioners would do a world of good. That’s where the waste comes, not just in money but also in time. Recently I’ve had to compile roughly fifteen years of medical records, and the process gets slowed down to a trickle in having to wait for everyone to get on the same page. There is nothing resembling streamlining or networking in the entire process.
.-= last blog ..Saturday Video =-.
The hang up is that they have to fill in all kinds of information that only applies to individual insurance companies, but the software requires all the boxes to be checked and blanks filled to cover from the possibility that the insurance companies will be changed. Privacy laws prevent the information from being shared. Medical records laws require paper forms be filed and kept.
All that was really needed was two 9 digit numbers that are tied to everything else for the insurance companies, the doctor’s id number from the prescription, and a local address and telephone number, but there was all kinds of other blanks that had to be filled in that makes me doubt the sanity of some insurance companies.
K-Mart pharmacies have good software for highlighting drug interactions and for tracking allergic reactions, but most doctors are doing this stuff from memory and have their own favorite drugs, and their records are all paper based.
The local hospital has electronic records, but no one seems to be able to look them, including the medical staff. The bar-coding of everything in sight is a nice concept, but if you can see the records when you are trying to treat a patient, having the information is pretty worthless. Again, there is no sharing of information allowed.
The core reality is that there is no real system in this mess, which is stupid given the predominance of Medicare and Tricare in the area due to the large number of military retirees.
Having gone through this horror with my mother-in-law, I give my sympathies, Bryan. We even got the traditional after death billing from a doctor not on her program, demanding just under $500 for a shot and some cream. We referred the doc to our lawyer and didn’t pay.
And trying to get health insurance for my son has been a real blast, let me tell you! Keep files on EVERYTHING because if you fill in one wrong bubble in answering the questions…..
.-= last blog ..Fuzzy math =-.
The problem is that the patients are often not in any condition to deal with this crap. If someone is sick, they don’t want to be taken around to a lot of different places to be asked a lot of damn fool questions, they want to go home and get better.
Frankly, I’m getting too old to take people to the emergency room and sit around for hours while people are coughing and, sometimes, bleeding around me. Who knows the last time the place was disinfected? If you weren’t sick when you walked in, you will be. I realize that it is inconsiderate of people to not get sick between 8am & 5pm Monday through Friday, but it happens, and pushing everyone into the emergency room is a stupid concept.
If we had single payer, the smart money would be in walk-in clinics that were open 3pm-11pm Friday through Tuesday – when working people can go, and the elderly can still drive before dark.
i really believe that whatever comes out of the world’s most dysfunctional body – the us congress, will end up making things worse. the congress has NO idea what average people go through to get any care.
.-= last blog ..Next Stop, Potemkin Village =-.
In the case I’m dealing with, the insurance is there and it doesn’t deny anything that I am aware of, but the freaking process is so convoluted that anyone with coverage from a private insurance company has to be going through tremendous stress. It’s to the point that Prozac should be handed out with the insurance claim forms.
Congress should be forced to eat on a food stamps budget, and get their health care with a standard policy for a couple of months. Let them see how they like dealing with the systems they have created.