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Ever notice every time something is suppose to be streamlined or simple... it ends up be neither...
Don't get me started on HIPPA regulations...
The cost of compliance is often the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to sole practitioners.
The last 4 years there has been a wave of MD retirements here... many simply do not enjoy being Doctors anymore.
A few have moved to big HMO and find it better to be an employee and not a MD/Practice Manager...
I suppose we will be hearing more about 1095 forms in the future.
I am not in the health care business but the concentration of health care into larger and larger, and thus fewer, providers has been happening in our area for years. If I am counting right, when I moved to NC, there were four hospital systems in the area. Now there are two or three. Much of this is to cover the admin costs of government regulations and smaller practices simply cannot bring in the revenue to cover the costs so they have to merge. Our MD work for the larger health care systems, not themselves and I don't think that is a good thing. A bone cracker we used to use was drowning in administrative work. Partly this was his fault since he did not want to hire the people to handle the work but I think he was caught between a rock in a hard place because he could not afford a person to do the work. Danged if he did and danged if he did not. He was trying to merge or get hired by a larger company so he could escape the paperwork.
Complicated systems are never made better by making them more complicated and that is what has happened to health care in the US. The wifey spent ALL day on Monday, and I do mean all day, as well as time over the weekend trying to figure out how she can get to a doc ASAP. She hurt her shoulder two weekends back, we heard a couple of POPS which is not good. :shocked: She went to a bone cracker instead of going to a MD so she lost a week of time getting an appointment. I told her to get to an MD to get an MRI ASAP but she ignored me.
Her other shoulder is messed up from a car accident and that shoulder took two surgeries to sorta kinda fix. An appointment to the doctor that fixed her shoulder in the past is 30 days out which we expected. The doc is one of the best, if not the best in the area, and I would expect the country. The wifey went to one quack with the shoulder injury and he wasted a year or two of time and made my wife endure quite a bit of pain from his incompetence before she got to the real doc that solved the problem.
So, after getting an appointment 30 days away, but needing a doc within two weeks of the injury, the wifey found a doc that saw her yesterday and ordered an MRI. Surprise Surprise.
So she had to get insurance to approve the MRI which normally would take a week or so. Thankfully, the wifey has enough experience working with the system, which really is not a good thing, and she was able to get the doctors office and insurance company to speed up the approval and she has an appointment in the next day or so for the MRI. :thumbsup: That is frustrating but that is the system. What is more frustrating is that we have a fairly high deductable so we will have to pay for the MRI out of pocket so why does insurance have to approve? Well, to credit our deductable AND to save us 15-30% of the cost of the MRI.
The system is messed up beyond belief and the huge Federal intrusion into health care is not helping but making it worse. Having larger and larger health care systems/companies being paid by insurance companies who are now making more money and growing in size because of government regulations, is not good for the patient and the person paying the bill.
Later,
Dan
