With so many things in the news this
week, and many of them worth writing about, I felt it necessary to
put Friday tidbits on a Saturday this time. I hope you think this is
worth your time as much as I enjoyed reading and writing about these
topics.
The first item is about using oxygen to
regenerate bone. This could be very important for our soldiers, and
then for others like those with diabetes having healing and
amputation problems. The results of the Department of Defense-funded
study were presented at the American Society for Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology annual meeting, held in conjunction with the
Experimental Biology conference in San Diego.
Multiple research teams have been
trying to figure out what makes that huge difference between regrowth
here and no regrowth there. The Tulane lab, in particular, has been
investigating which genes are turned on, which proteins are expressed
and which molecular activities change at the site of amputation over
time.
The second article or blog exposes some
of tricks our “caring” hospitals play on unsuspecting Medicare
patients. Since Medicare will not cover some of the tricks
hospitals commonly play, the full cost gets shoved on patients and
some of these costs are exorbitant and falsely inflated as high as
800 percent for some over-the-counter pills.
What hospitals are doing is admitting
patients as observational patients and not an inpatient status. This
is their way of billing full costs to the patient and saving money
for Medicare program payments. If there is a way to get the money,
hospitals are finding ways of passing costs onto the patients and at
the same time registering the patient for savings in the Medicare
program. This is what I would term getting money in both hands and
overcharging the patient and Medicare. Double dipping is another
term that comes to mind.
What patients on Medicare are advised
to do is check with their supplemental coverage plan to find out if
indeed hospitals in their coverage can get by not notifying them of
their status and billing requirements. Medicare does not care and
will not cover, but in some states the supplemental plans require a
hospital to notify the patient and get their signature before they
can bill them.
I strongly suggest that you take the
time to read this and then familiarize yourself with the rules in
your state. Whether this is for yourself or another family member,
know that forewarned is forearmed. This is one way to prevent being
taken advantage of by our uncaring and unscrupulous hospitals.
The last item is on the American health
care system and why we have less to say in our healthcare costs than
any other developed country. What Americans do control in healthcare
spending has declined faster than it has in any other developed
country in the last few decades for which we have data.
The data shows that the United States
has been moving in the wrong direction by removing health dollars
from patients' control. In turn it has been putting your healthcare
dollars in the hands of the government and insurers to spend. No
other developed country has allowed its citizens to lose almost half
of their healthcare dollars in the last twenty years.
In Canada, where a government monopoly
over residents' access top health care is in place, the share of
health spending controlled by patients has remained unchanged. With
this happening, Canadians now enjoy more direct control over their
health dollars than Americans do.
This tells us that we need to make
some changes and regain the advantage by making long-term goals to
return control of our healthcare funds and make this a top priority
in the coming election.
