A Rare Event: A Statement of the Health Care Truth by a Politician
by Lee Kurisko, MD Tim Hudak, leader of Ontario’s official opposition party, the Progressive Conservatives, made a statement of truth rarely heard in Canada. In Canada, any challenge to the religion...
View ArticleWhy Entitlement Programs for Healthcare are Broke
by G. Keith Smith, MD At the end of 2012, like the end of many prior years, physicians faced the draconian Medicare cuts, the threat of which has served to be one of the most effective fund raisers for...
View ArticleMost Hospitals Don’t Know Price of Hip Replacement
“Transparency is all the rage these days in government and business, but there has been little push for pricing transparency in health care, and there’s virtually no information,” said Dr. Peter Cram,...
View ArticleAetna Discontinues 12-Month Rate Guarantee
by Ralph Weber In a land not too far away, but in a time which is now past, health carriers offered 12-month, and in some cases, 24-month rate guarantees. Since most of the costly mandates of Obamacare...
View ArticleCounty Mounties and County Hospitals
by G. Keith Smith, MD I’m having a hard time imagining Andy Griffith hiding behind a bush shooting residents of Mayberry with a radar gun. It’s even harder to imagine the residents of Mayberry buying...
View ArticleHow are we going to pay the doctors?
by Jane Orient, MD Congress has been working on the medical cost problem since 1965. It still has not found the right way to pay doctors. Medical expenses started exploding soon after Medicare was...
View ArticleA Free Market Alternative to Obamacare is Medical Tourism
MediBid connects patients with doctors in the US and overseas. Our free market system allows the patient to shop for a physician with complete price transparency and select the destination they wish to...
View ArticleAn Impending Obamacare Fatality
by Keith Smith, MD Meet Dr. David Mokotoff, soon to be a casualty of the federal government’s involvement in health care. In his article in “Physician’s Practice”, he very kindly mentions our...
View ArticleSuspicions Confirmed!!
by Lee Kurisko, MD An increasing problem in day-to-day medical care has been drug shortages. Since 2005 drug shortage issues have quadrupled. In the last few years, as a diagnostic radiologist, our...
View ArticleThe Bundlers Are Coming! The Bunglers Are Coming!
by Marilyn Singleton, MD, JD My long-time self-paying patient opined that the end of fee-for-service payments (payment for what you get) was imminent. I lightheartedly asked her how physicians would be...
View ArticleH&R Block will capitalize on Obamacare
The firm prepares millions of tax returns, one of every seven that gets filed to the Internal Revenue Service. The vast majority of its consumers receive a refund; all told, their 26.5 million...
View ArticleCrony Capitalism History Repeats Itself
by G. Keith Smith, MD Prior to the Hill Burton Act of 1946, many if not most of the hospitals in the U.S. were owned by the physicians who worked in them. Passage of this legislation created what we...
View ArticlePrivate-Practice Medicine’s Future with Obamacare
This is a very frightening time to be a physician. Many doctors who own their own businesses are seeing such a dramatic drop in reimbursement that they go months between paychecks, even when they are...
View ArticleObamacare Insurance Plans Will Be Simple and Pricey
For one thing, insurers will want to protect against the risk that individuals entering the exchanges are those who most need health insurance because of pre-existing illness. If this sort of “adverse...
View ArticleObamacare ‘savings’ are an expensive joke
by Lee Hieb, MD I don’t own a television, but when I travel I get my dose of boob-tube popular culture and the 24-hour news cycle. This week I was amused to hear the shrill voices on multiple news...
View ArticleThe Pimple and the Cancer
by G. Keith Smith, MD A fellow physician told me recently that he had seen a worker’s compensation patient who had been treated and released by another surgeon for a wrist fracture. He was now in my...
View ArticleMedicaid is a tax on the estates of the poor
by Jane Orient, MD Most people think they’re exempt from the estate tax (often called the “death tax”) because they don’t have $2 million. A lot of people with low incomes do have some assets, however,...
View ArticleThe Obamacare Revolt: Physicians Fight Back
Dr. Ryan Neuhofel, 31, offers a rare glimpse at what it would be like to go to the doctor without massive government interference in health care. Dr. Neuhofel, based in the college town of Lawrence,...
View ArticleJoin us for a Webinar on May 21 Obamacare: Taxes, Fines, and Alternatives
Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/320619814 Join us at 6PM PDT/9PM EDT May 21st, for this informative webinar on the potential taxes, fees,...
View ArticleObamacare: Just a Broken Window
By G. Keith Smith, M.D. It is only a matter of time until a mainstream economist declares that the recent Oklahoma tornadoes will be great for the economy. He will say that there will be all kinds of...
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