Ben Glickman
By JEANNE PINDER and BEN GLICKMAN Telemedicine has boomed during the Covid-19 as an alternative to in-person visits. Doctors and patients alike are finding that the virtual visit — previously often described as a pale imitation of the actual in-person office visit — is a fine way to do health care in the middle of […]
Jeanne Pinder
Continuing with our series of interviews of people involved in health care in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, I caught up with Niall Brennan, C.E.O. of the Health Care Cost Institute research group, former chief data officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a former analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. […]
Jeanne Pinder
One of the biggest secrets in health care is the rates that insurance companies pay providers. One insurer might pay one provider $2,400 for an MRI and a different provider $400 — in the same locale and for the same MRI. But we rarely see documentation of that, because the rates are kept secret. So […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: “For months now, headlines about the Affordable Care Act have focused on complaints from big insurers that they haven’t been making money from individual insurance plans mandated by the act,” Michael Hiltzik writes in The Los Angeles Times. “The big insurer UnitedHealth Group has even whined about losing so many millions it’s thinking about withdrawing from […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: Health insurers beat down physicians in contract negotiations with fuzzy numbers, run-arounds, and other ruses associated with used-car lots, practice consultant Ron Howrigon told attendees here at the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) 2015 Annual Conference,” writes Robert Lowes over at Medscape. “Howrigon should know. For 18 years, he worked in the managed care […]
