Costs of Medical Care in Florida

The Miami Herald published the results of a study, which mirrors my personal experience with hospitals in South Florida: huge variation in quality of care and financial expenditures.
The key finding according to the Dartmouth Atlas Working group is that the more hospital beds and medical specialists that an area has, the more healthcare services a patient will be given.
In conclusion, as the supply of hospital beds and number of doctors increases so do utilization and costs.
This contradicts the assumptions that in a free market economy supply and demand should determine the price. Logically an increase supply should be reflected in decreased prices.
Well, healthcare executives are obviously dancing to a different tune.
The motto: get rich quick even we have to crash the system.
This will also affect the acceptance of HSA's, which in part are based on the assumption that the patient will have a financial incentive to negotiate prices. Thats an illusion! There is nobody to talk too and the prices are grotesquely inflated.
The one most affected are the growing numbers of uninsured citizens who are being bilked and exploited. Many of my papers report horror stories about how much they were being charged for lab and other diagnostic testing.
The study should also remind us that the investment in preventive healthcare services and community family health care centers would alleviate many of the problems we are facing.
As physicians we should speak up and not hide behind a firewall of financial interest.
The increasing costs will not only affect our patients pocket books, but ours too.
Yours
Bernd

Medicare Abuse

The Miami Herald reports in his May 3rd edition that two defendants (names contained in article posted on Miami Herald web site) are charged with offering and paying healthcare providers to send Medicare patients to National Medical Laboratory and CMS Open MRI (part of Cardiovascular Mobile Service Inc.), two Miami companies said to be owned or controlled by one of the defendants.

U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said his South Florida prosecutors have brought 36 new criminal healthcare fraud cases since the fiscal year began Oct. 1. The allegations involve at least $40 million in losses to Medicare and other government health programs.

In Tallahassee, legislators are contemplating Senate Bill 2112, which would make it more difficult to open a clinic. Much of the healthcare fraud being committed in Florida, officials say, is due to small clinics that quickly open, commit fraud, and then close when they sense investigators are getting closely, only to re-open under another name.

Comment: As physicians we should support any efforts including legislation to tighten the regulation of medical clinic ownership and management. Unfortunately, Medicare and Medicaid fraud is rampant in our community and we should proactively report any suspicion of abuse.

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