For weeks, one of the most widely emailed articles on Medscape, the physician-only medical news source, concerned Dr. Farid Fata, the 50-year-old cancer specialist who received a sentence of 45 years for fraud after administering inappropriate chemotherapy to hundreds of patients. Some of these patients had been previously cured of their cancer and yet he […]
Category: Health Insurance Issues
When Your ER Visit For A Cold Becomes A 17-Page Fax To Me
The very idea that a bad cold you have checked out in the emergency room translates into thousands of dollars in health care expenses–and 17 pages of medical records faxed to me–should tell you something’s wrong with the health care system. I’ll explain how this happens, but first here are two of the most common […]
“Just Have Your Doctor Write A Letter…”
Once, a long time ago, when I was in third grade at Oglesby School some minor illness kept me at home watching afternoon TV. When I returned, a well meaning classmate asked “You got your note?” I’m certain beads of sweat appeared on my forehead. “What note?” “Your note-for-being-absent.” He said it fast, like it […]
The Leviathan Swims In The Swill: Too Much Money To Ever Fix The System
I’m not quite sure where to go with this. Each week I flip through dozens of medical articles in an attempt to find one or two interesting health care developments you may not have read about. This week, I found myself tossing one article after another into a stack I mentally labeled “greed and its […]
Obama Kvells, Docs Report Misery, and A Modest Proposal
Kvell is a Yiddish word meaning super happy and proud. My grandmother, for example, kvelled when I actually got my MD degree, even though she’d been calling me Dr. Edelberg since I was two. This week, it was President Obama’s turn to kvell. He’d received great news about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which, now […]
Clip-N-Save: Your Healthcare Under the Affordable Care Act
Posted 03/24/2014 A hip replacement should not cost $13,000 in Iowa and $130,000 in New Jersey. That’s just crazy. Virtually everyone agrees that under our existing healthcare system the price of services–from a five-minute office visit to an appendectomy–needs some kind of regulation and standardization. And yet the standardization of prices is definitely not the […]
In-Network or Out-of-Network Physician: What’s Best For You?
Few patients truly grasp what it means when your primary care physician contracts into an insurance network. Actually, until doctors (including me!) have been under contract for a few years, we’re sort of confused about it ourselves. And it doesn’t help that in-network contracts vary widely among health insurance companies. Basically, the in-network doctor has […]
You Can Survive The Healthcare System
The entire healthcare system is rapidly changing. Despite the flaws in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I believe it’s a positive that virtually everyone now has access to medical care. When one of America’s poorest states, West Virginia, enrolled tens of thousands of impoverished citizens over a period of a few weeks, physicians observed a […]
We Want You To Die
It’s funny how the mind works. You find yourself in a particular situation and as you mull over what to do, all of a sudden up pops a line from a movie. Good old Freud, always reliable when it comes to mining your subconscious. The question, from the aliens-invade-earth action flick Independence Day, is posed […]
The Saga of Dr. Lasko
I need to complete the chronicle of Keith Alan Lasko, MD, begun last week in my Health Tip Pigs At A Trough with the story of the physician who wrote The Great Billion Dollar Medical Swindle some 35 years ago and then seemed to vanish. But completely disappear? Hardly. Based on what I’ve been reading […]
Pigs At A Trough
Posted 02/17/2014 I regularly revisit last year’s Time Magazine Special Report “Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” with the same conflicted feeling I had at about age six when I learned that something painful, like picking a scab or jiggling a loose tooth, also afforded a secret pleasure that could not be shared with friends. […]
Chilling Health Care News
It’s tempting to begin this health tip with “Here’s the news from Lake Wobegone…” You’ll soon discover why as I tell you about two recent articles of note. Also, I’d be most interested in your interpretation from a health care consumer’s point of view. The first article, published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, reported […]
Four Reasons To Like Obamacare
Like everyone who works in health care, I’m both excited and nervous about what the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, will mean for both patients and practitioners. I like to view my excitement as an optimistic one, similar to the way people must have felt in the 1930s when Social Security guaranteed […]
The Insanity of Healthcare Pricing
It’s hard to believe now, but about 50 years ago when you went shopping for a new car you simply had no idea how badly you were being stiffed by the dealer. Oh, sure, he might show you the invoice price from Detroit, but he’d also routinely add hundreds of dollars for shipping, dealer prep […]
You, The Patient: Fired!
The invitation looked harmless enough. One of Chicago’s largest health insurance companies was coordinating an evening meeting with physicians to discuss “the future in healthcare.” I knew this was coming. For the past few months, insurance companies had been conducting staff meetings at the larger medical groups to give physicians a reality check on their […]
A Blizzard, A French Restaurant, and the Future of Healthcare
Posted 03/11//2013 If you’d been one of the handful of pedestrians walking down Chicago’s Halsted Street during our snowstorm a couple weeks ago, you might have glanced into the window of an otherwise deserted French restaurant, your attention held for a moment by a pair of geezers engaged in extremely animated conversation in the warm […]
Amateur Night In The Emergency Room
Please read the important announcement about our acupuncturist Mari Stecker at the end of today’s Health Tip Let me pass on a tale of woe a new patient recently shared. There’s a useful lesson in health care within, and while I wouldn’t classify the event as malpractice (since no permanent damage occurred), it’s the story […]
Worrisome Trends in Health Care
Philosophically, by now you’ve gathered I was pleased that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) leaped nearly all its hurdles and will be taking effect in a couple years. It was simply wrong that the US has within its borders 40 million citizens with no access to our health care system, and also that insurers could […]
The Moral Obligation to Buy Health Insurance
Europeans are fascinated by the hurricane-force intensity around the US creating and ultimately passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Where European and US historians agree is that individual liberty has always taken priority in the US over the trend of European legislation to be crafted for the greater collective good. Why is this? Well, America […]
Doctors and Nurses as Prostitutes
At least once or twice a week, one of our staff people will observe me at my phone, fist clenched, smoke rushing from both ears, my feathers clearly ruffled. I’m told I also sound a bit like Gilbert Gottfried, but I think that’s unfair. So what is it that’s setting me off? Well, folks, it’s […]