Are Pills Priced Right?
A Wall Street Journal story on Friday morning was called New Push Ties Cost of Drugs to Effectiveness. Sounds similar to pay for performance. What a novel idea. It continues to amaze me how far behind healthcare is compared to other industries. In Health Attitude, I wrote about how Congress precluded Medicare from negotiating with the pharmaceutical […]
Medicare Spent $14M for Telemedicine Last Year
Medicare reimbursed healthcare providers $14M for telemedicine in 2014. The spending represents continued growth but still a drop in the bucket. The bucket of money Medicare spent in 2014 was $600 billion. As a percentage the telemedicine spending was .002%. The focus of telemedicine in the past has been rural America. Patients hundreds of miles from a […]
Medicare – Part 4
I have now been on Medicare for 18 months. Fortunately, I have not required significant clinical services and therefore do not have a lot of experience with the financial impact of Medicare. The medical insurance part of Medicare costs between $99.90 per month and $369.10 per month (per person), depending on your income. The poliiticians […]
e-Government
e-Government is a really good idea and there are many initiatives underway to make it happen (see Government 2.0). In some respects the U.S. Government has been a model for using the Internet. The IRS e-file program, for example, has been very successful with nearly 99 million individuals filing their federal income tax returns electronically […]
Medicare – Part 2
Hard for me to believe but I am about to go on Medicare! As I described in a rant about browser issues, the experience to date has been only with the administrative aspects– the clinical part does not start until next month. The entire enrollment was able to be completed online at medicare.gov — no faxes, no […]
