Every year, CMS publishes the National Health Expenditure (NHE) data; the most recent information was updated in December 2019 and reports data from 2018. The NHE gives important insight into how Americans spend their money on healthcare. For example, in 2018, health expenditures increased by 4.6% to an average of $11,172 per American. This represents […]
Prior Authorizations, Insurance Denials, and Physician Burnout
Insurance denials and insurance prior authorizations are the bane of existence for any physician who practices in an outpatient setting. The are at best an annoyance but last Friday, I had an experience that nearly made my head explode. At issue was the denial of a high resolution chest CT that I had ordered several […]
The Confusion About Medicare’s Two 3-Day Rules
Recently, one of our primary care physicians was telling me about one of his patients, an 85 year-old woman who had a knee replacement at a different hospital here in Columbus. She was in the hospital for 4 days after her surgery but was very slow to recover and was determined to be unsafe for […]
The Total Cost To Train A Physician
It costs more than $1.1 million to train a doctor in the United States. The societal investment in creating physicians is enormous and has widespread implications for American health care in everything from acceptance of international medical graduates to the future use of non-physician health care providers. Breaking down the costs Depending on the specialty, […]
Predicting The Future Of Medicine In 2035
I was asked to give a talk to the new internal medicine interns this week and it gave me a chance to think about what it is that we are training them for. Wayne Gretzky famously said “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” If we are […]
How Hospitals Get Blood For Transfusion
When the average person thinks of donating blood, the first words that come to mind are “Red Cross”. However, the American Red Cross only supplies about 40% of transfused blood in the United States. What most people don’t realize is that the U.S. uses a free-market approach to maintain its blood supply with the result […]
What The 2019 Fellowship Match Tells Us About The Future Of American Medicine
Last week, the National Resident Match Program released its annual data report on the most recent fellowship match for positions to begin in July 2019. The fellowship matches take place between May 2018 and January 2019, with different match days for different specialties. The NRMP releases a summary of all of the specialty match results […]
The 2019 Medicare Readmission Penalty
In September, CMS released the financial penalties that hospitals will pay for excessively high percentages of readmissions within 30 days of discharge. This is an annual event when hospitals get to find out how much their reimbursement from Medicare will be cut the next year. CMS focuses on 6 diagnoses when calculating the readmission penalty: […]
Pre-Existing Conditions And Individual Mandates
The Affordable Care Act is the piece of legislation that Americans simultaneously both love and hate. Americans love not being excluded from health insurance if they have pre-existing conditions but hate being forced to buy health insurance if they don’t want to. And so, there has been an effort to eliminate the individual mandate to […]
The Final 2019 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule: Some Winners, No Losers
Last week, CMS released the final rule for the 2019 Medicare Physician fee schedule. The initial proposed fee schedule was released last summer and would have radically changed the way that physicians are paid for outpatient clinical practice. There was a lot of criticism of the proposed fee schedule with most professional medical societies opposing […]