Tag Archives: medicare

by

Coming soon: The Unaffordable Health Care Act!

Coming soon in the United States!

Aren’t you sick of the Affordable Care Act? aka Obamacare? Time for a new administration and time to get rid of Affordable Care. We don’t want that! Competition, Corporations and Profit First!

Call Mr. Future President Trump, call you congress persons, call your senator, call your representative, call your state ones. Stand up and be heard, US Citizens! Tell them you are all for the Unaffordable Health Care Act! We can kill more small businesses faster! We can make doctors and nurses quit by age 50! We can have more people turn to addictive drugs for numbing and comfort!

Come on, US Citizens! You voted! Now call! The Unaffordable Health Care Act! brought to you by an all conservative all corporate all discriminatory group of unbelievably rich congresspeople and your stinking rich and suing everyone future president.

Or you could say you want Medicare For All! Hey, one system, one set of rules, all US citizens have care, we could start small businesses, business might return to the US since they don’t have to pay more and MORE and MORE for health insurance, wages would go up instead of yearly decreases in health care coverage….nah, US Citizens, you wouldn’t want that, would you?

by

Your health care dollar

I have been writing posts about fraud in medicine: but I think I am using the wrong title. Instead it should be your health care dollar: how the US medical corporate system wastes your health care dollar.

Think about it. What do you want to spend that dollar on?

Do you want it to go to 1300 different insurance companies and their web sites, their advertising, their competition and their profit? Do you want your healthcare dollar to go to complex coverage rules and contracts, to forms for prior authorization, for the weekly postcards and emails that they send me telling me that they have changed your coverage? Is it any surprise that I have no idea if your insurance company covers a test? They may have last week and not this week. The overhead for medicare is 2-3% administrative costs. Now why would we privatize that when the overhead for the health insurance companies is 20-30%?

How much of your health care dollar do you want to go to corporate competition?

I don’t want ANY of my health care dollar going to corporate competition and profit. I want my health care dollar going to my HEALTH. We spend the most per person in the world, almost twice as much per person per year as the next most expensive: and we don’t guarantee care. Hello, the next most expensive and all of the other nearly 40 countries, first and second world, have universal care for all their citizens. So is our care twice as good?

No, no, no, and no.

Hello, new administration. Let’s put the health care dollar where it is paying for health…. in medicare for all and in a single payer system. We have guideline after guideline on how we should treat illnesses, here:

US Preventative Task Force

The guidelines are regularly updated. If we have medicare for ALL then I will KNOW whether a test is covered or not. I have memorized the entire list of medicare covered screening tests and all the details: screen for abdominal aortic aneurysm is covered in male patients age 65-75 who have smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their life and any patient who has a family history. I have the whole list in my brain.

You CAN make a difference. Write to your congresspeople, state and national. Call them. Email them. They all have websites. Tell them YOUR health care story or the story of a friend or family member.

Join Health Care Now and Physicians for a National Health Program.

I want my health care dollar to go to HEALTH CARE.

For the Daily Post Prompts: gone and interior. Interior because I am so angry at the poor spotty costly health care for my fellow people in the US. And gone: your health care dollars is GONE: let’s use the next one wisely.

by

Cloudy with a chance of hope

This is for the Daily Prompts: hopeful and year.

I took this from the beach with my zoom lens: fog, clouds, lowering, indistinct. My daughter left for college in September and is home now…. well, sort of, except she is off with friends all over the place, including right now.

It’s been a cloudy and hopeful period, since September. It is the first time in 24 years that I have not had children or teens at home, and the first time in 28 years that I have lived nearly alone…just the cat. The cat is not happy with then young adults leaving. She blames me.

I am worried about the US Medical system, the corporate takeover where more and more physicians are employed and then have no connection to how their patients are billed. They also take no responsibility for people going bankrupt over medical bills. We physicians are as responsible for the mess of US Health Care as the patients are, as Congress is, for letting 1300 insurance companies use 500 billion dollars on administrative costs….And people say I don’t trust government healthcare….but don’t take away my mother’s medicare, the VA benefits, medicaid for the disabled and very poor or the healthcare for our active duty. And yet I see for profit companies like triwest: the government contracts my local VA care to them and I fought Triwest for a year to get them to pay me for my Veterans Choice patients. And they won’t pay me for the time we spent fighting to get paid, nor the interest for waiting on a payment for an entire year. Guess who got that money? The For Profit Contractor Corporation: Triwest. And Noridian, the local medicare contractor, held my payments for 6 months. They said my paperwork was wrong….turned out it had been wrong for six years but they frankly didn’t care until they were getting audited. So who paid the price? I did and you did. In rising costs and confusion and physicians quitting. Again, I did not see a penny for the time on the phone, for the time spent trying to ask Noridian why, after 6 years of payments, they were refusing my renewal…..and meanwhile I saw my patients and went further into debt. And do you think the bank corporation wrote off their profits? No, you laugh at that…..

But, you say, where is the hope? The hope is that I think we are at the point where enough physicians are quitting outright, enough Veterans Choice patients are calling their Congress People, the patients refuse to be patient any longer….and I am seeing more people fight for a single payer system, for a system where the money does not go to profit and administration while people die waiting for prior authorization and insurance corporations change the rules every week and refuse and refuse and refuse care…..I think people: patients and physicians: will wake up and change the system.

And that, Mr. Trump, is what I would do to make the US great again….

 

 

 

 

 

by

Fraud in medicine: why “help” won’t help

This article:  Doctors wasting over two thirds of their time doing paperwork showed up on Facebook yesterday.

The problem is that “hiring people to help with paperwork” will not help.

Why? We’ve already done that and it’s a huge mess.

For example: I was referred to an Ear Nose and Throat Specialist at one of the Seattle Mecca hospitals. I had to travel two hours and then in the waiting room I was given a four page patient history to fill out. I filled it out. I had been referred by a Neurologist, who sent a letter and note. After I filled out the forms, HIPAA and “you will pay if your stupid insurance won’t” and address and consent to be treated and yada yada…. I waited.

At last I was shown to a very luxurious room. There a medical assistant asked me many of the same questions that I’d filled out on the form and which were already in the letter and note from the neurologist. She typed these into the EMR- electronic medical record. Then she left. And I waited.

At last the distinguished otolaryngologist entered the room. He said, “I see that you are here for chronic sinus infections.”

“No.” I said. “I am not.”

Silence.

“I see that you did not read anything I filled out and I am a physician and I drove two hours to see you.”

Silence. “Um.” he said. “Uh, why are you here?”

“Strep A sepsis twice and we want to know if my tonsils should be removed.”

Right. So… all that paper you fill out before the physician saw you? Yeah, like, my impression is that physicians don’t read it until after you leave. And maybe mostly don’t EVER read it.

I plan to find out the next time I have to see a specialist. I will write “you don’t read this anyhow, so I am not filling this shit out” on page 2 and see if the specialist notices. Bet you money they don’t. Though when they yell at their staff for not entering my medication allergies or the review of systems, they might notice.

So… I am a primary care physician. What do I do?

A new patient has one form: name, address, insurance information, hipaa and “you pay if your insurance doesn’t”.

I do the health history myself in the room entering it in the first visit, which takes 45 minutes to an hour. WHOA! INEFFICIENT! Nope. Actually it is brutally efficient. For four reasons:

One — I enter it myself and ask the questions myself and I am really fast at it.

Two — now I know the person, because I went over all of it: complaint, history of present illness, past medical history, social history, allergies, review of systems, and I ask people to bring all their pills including supplements to the first visit and I enter them too. And I look at the bottles. I don’t like vitamins with 6667% of the Recommended Dietary Allowance of any vitamin, lots of vitamins now have herbs in them too and I would not recommend taking cow thymus, labeled as bovine thymus.

Three — Now I don’t have to spend time reading forms filled out in the waiting room or a history entered by someone else, because I don’t have time to do that anyhow. I did it all in the visit. I will still have to read old records and any labs or xray results or consult notes or pathology reports and hey, where do you think the waiting room paperwork falls in that priority list? Yeah, like never.

Four — I hand people a copy of the note as they leave and ask them to read it and to bring corrections if I got it wrong. They go from thinking that I am a drone staring at the laptop to saying, “Hey, she typed nearly everything I said (and she has three spelling errors).”

Because the truth is that medicine is really complicated now and it just doesn’t help to have more people “do the paperwork”. I have to read the notes and labs and reports myself, because I am the physician.

There are three things that WOULD help:

1. One set of rules. Hello, the insurance companies, all 500ish of them send us postcards and emails every week saying “Hey, we’ve changed what we cover, meaning we cover less and we have new improved and more complicated prior authorization rules! Go to our website to read all about it.” Guess how often I have time to do that. NEVER NEVER NEVER. I read medicare’s rules. So medicare for all, single payer is partly to have ONE SET OF RULES. I can memorize miles of rules, but not if they are changing in 500 companies every week. Shell game. Also, prior authorization means “your insurance company is making your doctor fill out paperwork in hopes that they can delay or refuse the care your doctor thinks is best for you.”

2. One electronic medical record. Right now there are about 500 of them too and none of them talk to each other so we are all “paperless”. Ha. It’s worse than ever, because we get 100 pages or 200 or 300 of printed out electronic medical record for every single new patient. I need two more big file cabinets for my “paperless” office. Hong Kong did it in 9 months. What, are we wimps? Make a decision.

3. Standardization of lab and xray and home health and physical therapy and nursing home and rehab and hospital order forms. Because every stupid lab form is different: not only arranged differently but also the lab panels are different, the requirements for what that lab wants to fill the order is different and the results are arranged differently on the page. Hello. Stupid, right? Any efficiency expert would laugh.

And that’s how we could really help doctors help patients.

by

Dear Mr. Donald Trump

Two weeks ago I sent this letter to Mr. Trump and all of the presidential candidates. To date I have gotten a form letter from Mrs. Hilary Clinton.

Dear Mr. Donald Trump and all Presidential candidates:

Mr. Trump, I am a rural family practice physician, a woman, who owns and runs my own medical clinic. I take care of patients from age zero to 104. Currently my oldest is 98. I take medicare and most insurances, but not medicaid.

I am running into legal immorality across the board from health insurance corporations that are maximizing profits at the expense of my health care dollar, our taxes and my patients. I would like your advice.

For example, the Veterans Hospital contacted me in May of 2015 and asked me to accept Veterans Choice patients, veterans who live more than 40 miles from the nearest VA Hospital. I accepted. I have 6 veteran patients, who are very complicated. To date I have not been paid for one visit. Now, before you say this is the fault of our government, it isn’t. It is the private for profit government contractor Triwest who is not paying me. They have my notes and we have followed their instructions on how to submit bills. Would you advise me to drop these patients?

For example, my father died in 2014. I called the oxygen company to pick up 6 tanks of oxygen. Then I found 8 more. I gently inquired why he had 14 tanks. The company said that his medical orders said that he should wear it continuously, so they delivered it. “Medicare paid for it.” they said. Ah. Well, I kept the other 8 tanks, because it is my and my father’s oxygen in those tanks: the company can have the tanks back when they are empty.

For example, the head of the sleep apnea supply company came to see me. He said, “You are getting in the way of your patients getting needed equipment.” I said, “Really? How?” “You only allowed a refill of one of the 8 necessary pieces of CPAP tubing instead of signing off on the whole group so we can fill as needed.” “Ah.” I said, “Actually my patients are tired of you mailing them 8 pieces of plastic that are filling up their closets and they don’t want extra plastic crap.” He mails it at the interval allowed by medicare, never mind whether the patient wants or needs it.

For example, I called a patient’s insurance to get a prior authorization last week for a limited sinus CT. They no longer do prior authorizations. They will decide whether to cover the CT scan once they read my notes. I asked if there was ANY way to see if it would be approved. They offered to let me send a letter to a PO Box in Wisconsin. My patient was sick, Mr. Trump. What do you suggest the patient and I do?

This is all legal. But it is not moral. So, Mr. Trump, where do you stand? Is our country’s highest value free enterprise and profit at any cost, no matter how many of our seniors are legally ripped off? Or do we have morals that health care and our elderly are important and need to be protected from legal but predatory businesses.

Please let me know, Mr. Trump. I would rather stick with my small clinic in the United States. At this point I would be financially and emotionally better off working as a temporary doctor internationally. I am sure that there is immorality internationally, but I will be less ashamed when it is not MY country.

Thank you.

 

by

Fraud in medicine: medicare application

Medicare quit paying my clinic at the end of July, on the 31st.

I was still half time in clinic, we were interviewing a new receptionist as my receptionist of five years wanted to retire by August first. We got some sort of notification from medicare, but their letters are very cryptic.

My new receptionist was needing orientation and help and I was really tired after July. I redid the medicare application and sent it in. We continued to see medicare patients and turn in the bills.

Our medicare contractor is noridian. They sent us a cryptic letter saying that something was wrong with the application. This was, mind you, a renewal. I had been seeing medicare patients for five years in my clinic.

I call them. I am given a name and a number to identify the call. I have two Ptan numbers, one for me as a physician and a second for the clinic. The first call said that my personal Ptan application was correct but the clinic one wasn’t.

I did it again and mailed it. Second day air. He said that our payments should be released in 10-14 days.

Ten days. Nothing. Fourteen. Nothing. I am pulling from savings to run the clinic. I call a second time. Again I am given a name and a number. She said I had to CALL to get paid once the application was received. I said the first guy didn’t say that. She said another 10-14 days.

We wait. After ten days I call. A third number and person. Once again I have a cryptic email. I ask about the PTan number on the email, which is not my clinic’s Ptan number. Oh, says the man, that is what is wrong with your application. He says to do form (numbernumbernumber B) not form (numbernumbernumber A). And it will be 10-14 days after they receive it.

I do it AGAIN. I do notice that all of the old copies of the form in our file have the PTan numbers wrong. Weird. They have been paying me for five years.

Ten days. I call a fourth time. She says that it will be 30 days not 10 to 14 until medicare lets me know if my application is correct. Or they might pay me after 10-14 days. They aren’t, so I argue that something must still be wrong. What is it? She can’t tell me. I want a supervisor. She says that I can talk to a supervisor in 10-14 days. We figure out that the Ptan number on the application is correct. I say, “I am writing my congresswoman.” and hang up.

So I do. I find my Senator’s email and I write to her. I have been a rural family practice doctor for 25 years and I saw a 98 year old yesterday and a 91 year old today and I LIKE my elderly patients, but I have HAD it with medicare, at least with the contractor noridian that is running medicare for my state. I list the phone call dates and names and identifying numbers and I say FIX IT because otherwise I am for the first time in 25 years seriously considering quitting medicare.

Two days later noridian sends an email saying they are releasing my payments.

The next day we get a direct deposit for $9000.00. That is a START.

One week later we get a call from noridian explaining what is wrong with our application. Not just one thing. Noridian doesn’t seem to have a copy of our business license from five years ago. We have to put the personal Ptan on page xgyb-14. They want details about the nursing home. Do I do home visits?

The noridian person explains that our application has actually been wrong for five years, but now they are getting audited so they have to get everything cleaned up.

So THEY have KNOWN it was wrong for five years, but held my payments since July, while they try to get their act together and tell me what the hell is wrong with it?

I want to be paid INTEREST for all the time I have spent on the phone and redoing the cryptic application.

And many thanks to my congresswoman, for keeping my clinic open.

I took the picture at the Kinetic Sculpture Festival here in September. The outfits make more sense than dealing with noridian, that’s for sure….

first posted on everything2.com on 11/30/15

by

Causes of Death in the United States in 2012

When I first started doing annual physicals I sat down and looked at the top causes of death and then organized the counseling part of the physical around them: starting with heart disease and working down the list. I think of the annual physical as my opportunity to “MOM” patients and say “STOP DRINKING LIKE A FISH OR YOU GONNA DIE EARLY,” though perhaps with a little more diplomacy. Sometimes without much diplomacy at all.

The top ten causes of death in the United States in 2012 were heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, unintentional injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db168.htm#which_population

This is 2,543,279 deaths in 2012.

Let’s take the causes one by one.

Heart disease: This is number one. 599,711 deaths. 23.6% of total deaths all ages both sexes in the US in 2012. So that is where I start when I do the counseling part of a physical.

Let’s review heart disease risk factors:
hypertension
high cholesterol
family history
diabetes
kidney failure
lack of exercise
tobacco
alcohol
smoking other things…
illegal drugs
stress
obeisity
As you might guess, this part of the discussion can use up a lot of the visit….

Cancer: All the cancer deaths together are 22.9% of the 2012 total.
We can screen for a few cancers: lung cancer is now the number one killer for both sexes. A chest xray is useless for screening. There is a certain population of current or former heavy smokers where a screening CT is useful. No, I do not recommend a “screening full body CT”, that is crap. Yes, lung cancers do get picked up randomly when we do a chest film for some other reason.
We can screen for breast cancer, colon cancers, look for skin cancers, the prostate cancer screen is a counseling nightmare and I don’t recommend a PSA but will do one if the person wants and other cancers pretty much we have to watch for symptoms….stop smoking, ok? That’s what causes 70% of the lung cancer and breast cancer used to be number one in women but smoking made lung cancer beat it out….
If you want details about any screening test, go to the US Preventative Task Force site:
http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Name/tools-and-resources-for-better-preventive-care

Chronic lower respiratory diseases at 5.6%: ok, smoking again. Emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, AKA COPD. Asthma too. This article is fascinating, that third generation children of smokers in a polluted part of California are worse and have inherited genetic modifications than third generation children of non-smokers who live in a less polluted part of California. Lovely. I grew up in a two pack a day camel household and no wonder my lungs are tricky.

Stroke, also called CVA, cerebrovascular accident, at 5.1% and then there are TIAs, transient ischemic accidents, the stroke warning symptom.

What are the risk factors for stroke?
Oh, smoking of course
hypertension
high cholesterol
stress
lack of exercise
obeisity
blocked carotid arteries
blood clots
atrial fibrillation

Unintentional injuries at 5.3%, also known as accidents.

Deaths from prescription medicines taken correctly outstripped deaths by MVAs, motor vehicle accidents and guns in 2007. The CDC declared an epidemic of overdose deaths, but it’s just starting to creep into newspapers and public consciousness.

Here: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6101a3.htm

The unintentional injury counseling list includes:
wear your seatbelt
don’t drive inebriated
don’t get in the car with inebriated drivers
check your smoke alarms
in the elderly, decrease fall risk. don’t stack stuff on the stairs.
wear a helmet if you bicycle motorcycle ATV rollarblade ski or invent some new way of getting on the Darwin list. Base jump, for example.
don’t take a lot of controlled prescription medicines or combine them with each other or combine them with alcohol: opiates with benzodiazepines with alcohol with ambien or sonata with barbituates and hello, the drug dealer is not your friend and tells lies: they are cutting the methamphetamines here with tricyclic antidepressants and barbituates and my long term cocaine addict patient was getting methamphetamines with benzodiazepines when he was paying for cocaine. Really.

Alzheimer’s at 3%

This is moving up the list. Fast. Everyone dies of something. Alzheimer’s patients live an average of seven years from diagnosis….And the recent article about Human Growth Hormone transmitting not only prions but Alzheimer’s is really interesting, implies an infectious cause.

Here: http://www.nature.com/news/autopsies-reveal-signs-of-alzheimer-s-in-growth-hormone-patients-1.18331

That was HGH from cadavers. I still would not take HGH made in a lab for “anti-aging” either. Nope, nope, nope.

We don’t know how to prevent Alzheimer’s but that is not the only cause of dementia and we’re still naming different kinds. Very frequently a brain CT or MRI says “decreased white matter” or “small vessel disease”, so there is a contribution from all of the heart and stroke risk factors that can do bad things to the brain with the top ones being: tobacco, alcohol, hypertension, high cholesterol, stress, lack of exercise, diabetes, illegal drugs, and so forth. Keep your brain active and busy.

Diabetes at 2.9%
Ok, it can make you more likely to have a heart attack. Also the biggest cause of blindness in US adults and the biggest cause of lower limb, yes, foot or leg amputation and the biggest cause of kidney failure in adults. Also if your legs are numb from uncontrolled diabetes, you don’t feel injuries and are less able to heal infections. And if blood sugar is high, there are lots of bacteria and especially staph and strep that LIKE high sugar.

influenza and pneumonia at 2.1%

Get Your Flu Shot. Really. And if you are 65 or older or you have tricky lungs or you have a tricky heart, get the pneumovax shot. The pneumovax protects against pneumococcal pneumonia ONLY, not all the colds or influenza or hemophilus influenza. And get your Tdap, because that stands for Tetnus, Diptheria, acellular Pertussis. Pertussis is whooping cough. It’s back. We’ve had three outbreaks in our county in five years. It kills babies under six months. They don’t whoop, they just stop breathing, apnea. Other people whoop, but even with antibiotics, they can cough for MONTHS. The flu shot usually gives 80% protection by two weeks after the shot. Only 80%, people say? Well, are you perfect?

Kidney disease at 1.8%

Causes: kidneys get worse as we age, for one thing.
diabetes
supplements and drugs: kidney failure is on the rise! Everything that we absorb and metabolize is metabolized by either the liver or the kidneys. Liver function can be perfect at age 100: that is, if it has not been trashed by alcohol, hepatitis B or C, drugs, supplements, mushrooms, whatever. Kidney function usually drops by age 80 and I am there calculating the function before I choose an antibiotic because you have to use lower doses in the over 80 crowd and the early kidney failure crowd. If you take ANY PILLS you should have a yearly test of your kidneys and liver function.
infection can hurt kidneys
inherited disorders

Suicide at 1.6%
40,600 deaths in the United States in 2013

Risk Factors http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/riskprotectivefactors.html

Family history of suicide
Family history of child maltreatment
Previous suicide attempt(s)
History of mental disorders, particularly clinical depression
History of alcohol and substance abuse
Feelings of hopelessness
Impulsive or aggressive tendencies
Cultural and religious beliefs (e.g., belief that suicide is noble resolution of a personal dilemma)
Local epidemics of suicide
Isolation, a feeling of being cut off from other people
Barriers to accessing mental health treatment
Loss (relational, social, work, or financial)
Physical illness
Easy access to lethal methods
Unwillingness to seek help because of the stigma attached to mental health and substance abuse disorders or to suicidal thoughts

And for those who want in depth information, 15 leading causes of death by state:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/mortality/lcwk9.htm