Anar Mikailov

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REDDIT WINS

HIGH-DEDUCTIBLE HEALTH PLANS [CAN] HAVE SOME DOWNSIDES [BUT EMPLOYERS CAN COUNTER THEM]

POSTED ON: August 30th, 2010

TAGS: access | employee health | HDHP | health insurance | health savings account | high deductible health plan | prevention

Patient Money –…

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source | Onion News Network

Problem = Expensive health care plan that provides poor customer service and low quality of care

Solution = Direct Pay Medical Practices

 Direct-pay practices are the only sustainable primary care business model that aligns the incentives between the two parties that matter, the patient and the doctor.

brucehopperjrmd:

Of course this is the answer to affordable primary CARE.  

Read the article linked to Jay Parkinson MD’s post from yesterday on group purchasing organizations (GPOs), status quo corporations, and small innovative companies.

direct-pay : third-party :: small, innovative company : GPO :: innovation : status-quo   

It’s David vs. Goliath, and we know the ending to the story.   

Hero

Conclusions  The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial.

Gorilla Glass Demonstration (by Gizmodo)

I’m investing in GLW as they speak…

How about that for Free Market?

direct TV russian commercial (via vsc632)

I want the mini giraffe!

beautiful

Funny

jayparkinsonmd:

Approximately 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, and even more, 6.9 million, are allergic to seafood. However, all told, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just two thousand hospitalizations per year (out of more than thirty million hospitalizations nationwide). And, at most, only 150 people (both children and adults) die each year from food allergies. Compare that to the fifty people who die each year from bee stings, the hundred who die from lightning strikes, and the forty-five thousand who die from motor vehicle accidents. Or compare that to the ten thousand children who are hospitalized each year for traumatic brain injuries acquired during sports, or the two thousand who drown, or the roughly thirteen hundred who die from gun accidents. Yet there are no calls to end athletics. There are likely thousands of parents who rid their cupboards of peanut butter but not guns. And more children assuredly die walking or being driven to school each year than die of nut allergies.

The question is not whether nut allergies exist, or whether they can occasionally be serious, or whether reasonable accommodations should be made for the few children who have documented serious allergies. The question is, what accounts for society’s extreme response to nut allergies? Not surprisingly, the response bears many of the hallmarks of Mass Psychogenic Illness. A few people have clinically documented concerns, but others who do not then copy the behaviors of those who do. Anxiety spreads from person to person to person, and a sense of proportion and the ability to be reassured are lost.

via Connected

BRILLIANT!

jayparkinsonmd:

I went to Penn State for medical school and graduated in 2002. For the past two years I’ve been paying $4995 per month to pay off my loans. 

This kind of debt essentially forces medical students to enter high-paying specialties. And that’s why your old-school primary care physician will not exist when boomers retire. Less than 5% of med students went into the low-paying specialty, primary care, last year. Why is this a problem? Because a specialist workforce will only increase the cost of care and make it much more disjointed when nobody has a primary care doc to keep your care organized. There are some people trying to figure out how to solve this problem:

The piece, published earlier this month in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, proposes that med schools cut out tuition and fees during medical education, then collect a fixed percentage of income for 10 years after a physician has finished training. Because specialties vary in their training time, a neurosurgeon might not start paying until 13 years after entering med school, while for a family practitioner payment could start as soon as seven years after beginning school.

Using a fixed percentage would help doctors choose a specialty or an employer without worrying as much about how it would affect their ability to repay educational debt, says Weinstein. “Those students who are financially successful in lucrative specialties will return more financial support to their medical school, whereas those in primary care specialties, public health professions or charity work will pay less,” the authors write.

That makes sense to me. Primary care doctors should not be penalized. They are the backbone of a highly functioning, coordinate healthcare system.

brucehopperjrmd:

Just leaving office. Love this space. Designed so well… Thanks JT. Many of its features reflect upon health and the direct patient-doctor collaborative relationship. “Modern medicine the old-fashioned way.”

Just visited Dr. Bruce Hopper’s HelloHealth office.  Beautiful space, no wait and back to the way healthcare should be. This is definitely the future of Medicine!  

Alexander Suvorov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“What is difficult in training will become easy in a battle”

Medical News: Tranexamic Acid Reduces Trauma Deaths - in Emergency Medicine, Emergency Medicine from MedPage Today

Oil Spill Disaster 2010 part344 Fareed Zakaria Criticizes Media Attention On Obama Oil Spill Emotion (via NatureCitizan)

The study was limited because it may not be generalizable to women and other ethnic groups. Also, its cross-sectional nature precludes any findings about causality.

Further adjustment for socioeconomic status, smoking, physical activity, and visits to the dentist attenuated the link. Additional controls for body mass index, family history of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and physician-diagnosed diabetes also reduced the relationship but not to the point where significance was lost.