This is the upper end or the delivery of product and care of the healthcare food chain. If you want to improve healthcare delivery pricing, you might want to go down a couple of levels more also. The costs of pharma and healthcare supplies are areas to investigate. It may have a bit more of an impact. Rituxan at Medicare prices or private insurance prices. There is a price in between which can be achieved and better than today’s prices. A...
Read More »Medicare’s Discretion to Say No to Unproven Therapies, Medical Devices, and Equipment
If it is not Medicare Advantage plans over-charges tapping into Medicare funds designated for the care of seniors, it is the commercial healthcare companies such as pharma this time and again. The political influence these companies wield with legislators and probably SCOTUS justices (later as companies sue and quickly levitate to a SCOTUS hearing) who are willing to take advantage as untouchables to practices of ethical behavior is seen in the...
Read More »Ultra-processed foods are bad for your health, avoid them
At night, I will soak a third of a cup of rolled oats, oat bran, raisins, almonds, a bunch of seeds, etc. in skim milk. Toss some crumbled walnuts in there to go along with the almonds and hazel nuts and blue berries or other fruit if I have it. The oats soak up the milk which makes them edible. Kind of a sweet taste. Maybe there is more natural food in terms of what it is? It seems to work for me. Stay away from high sodium content. The soups are...
Read More »Part 2 of Saving Rural Hospitals – Problems and Solutions for Rural Hospitals
I broke this report into two parts as it becomes harder to complete reading when each of us has other obligations. CHQPR or the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform is a national policy center facilitating improvements in healthcare payment and delivery systems. As explained earlier in Part 1, rural hospitals are facing issues remaining open due to the lack of revenue for the services provided and a lack of use of various services. The...
Read More »Mosquito Sex Ratio Distortion
First sex ratio disruption is an important general topic in population biology. An allele which causes I note that I have been (ignorantly) discussing this topic for more than 10 years “A disrupted sex ratio can, in principle, drive a species extinct. Consider an abnormal genome which causes a male to produce only male sperm. This could, in principle spread through a population causing a shortage of females and reduced fitness. The key...
Read More »Women’s out-of-pocket healthcare costs are higher than for men
Out-of-pocket healthcare costs are $15 billion higher for US women than men, qz.com, Clarisa Diaz Healthcare financial burden on women persists outside of maternity related care. That is the crux of the issue. Women pay more for healthcare. Consulting firm Deloitte: The analysis of the resulting costs after the current benefit coverage is applied, indicates a women’s out-of-pocket medical costs are significantly higher than men’s for every...
Read More »Humans red in tooth and claw?
The New Yorker has an interesting article by Manvir Singh about fad diets, with a focus on all-animal diet as ostensibly the diet best suited to our species. A character who brands himself “The Liver King” specifically endorses grassfed beef liver. The paleo diet industry insists that humans evolved to kill animals and devour their tissues and organs, eating plant matter in desperate circumstances.In reality, the best research we have suggests that...
Read More »Saving Small Rural Hospitals, Problems and Solutions
This is quite a bit of band width to be recited at Angry Bear. The problem with healthcare facing smaller hospitals and healthcare is the lack of resource once you are outside of the metropolitan areas. You are pretty much on your own. If the resource is not there, it may be an hour or so away. Can treatment wait that long? It is something to think about. Saving Rural Hospitals – Problems and Solutions for Rural Hospitals, chqpr.org. I broke...
Read More »Buprenorphine Naloxone & Naltrexone
I think the main practical point is that pharmacological treatment of opioid addiction is effective and yet not as easily available as it should be. Not all opioid use disorder (OUD) specialized treatment programs offer medication assisted treatment (I have a somewhat out of date report that in 2017 “only … 35.5% offered any single medication for opioid use disorder treatment. ” This is more recent information “ “Though the benefits of...
Read More »A Healthcare Insurance System Making Patients Sicker and CEOs Rich
A bit of a rewrite on this commentary to make it clear and precise in what it is saying. What is occurring is the Insurance Companies and their CEOs are profiting off of our illness. Insurance Policy pricing keeps going up along with the healthcare insurance deductibles. Unless one can afford the insurance premiums, people rely on higher deductibles. The other issue is such profit taking by executives can leave a company at risk when the economy...
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