Preventive Care

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Less Money for Preventive Care, More Money for Docs

February 22, 2012 in Medicaid/Medicare, Physician Compensation | No comments

Merrill Goozner reports that paying for the “doc fix” comes at the cost of preventive services.

Friday’s payroll tax cut extension bill included $18 billion to maintain Medicare physician salaries at current levels for the rest of this year. Unlike the payroll tax extension, Congress insisted on paying for the doc-fix with offsetting budget cuts.  They raised nearly a third of the money by cutting $5 billion from prevention programs initiated under the Affordable Care Act. The rest came from reduced payments to hospitals, nursing homes, and clinical labs, and reduced Medicaid payments to Louisiana.

Smoking cessation programs? Cut. Outreach to schools to get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables? Cut. More programs at local YMCAs to prevent diabetes? Cut.“The idea of paying for a ten-month fix in physician payments with a ten-year cut in prevention programs is the ultimate penny-wise, pound-foolish move,” said Richard Hamburg, deputy director of Trust for America’s Health, which lobbies for community prevention programs and more funding for state and local health departments.

Preventive care programs may improve the quality of life for some individuals, but according to the CBO expanded use of preventive care “leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.”  Thus, although cutting preventive care may seem to increase medical costs in the long-run, in practice the deal to cut preventive care services should save enough move to pay for this year’s doc fix.

 

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Taiwan’s National Health Insurance System: Part II

October 3, 2011 in International Health Care Systems | No comments

A recent Health Economics article by Hsiou and Pylypchuk (2011) examines differences in preventive care and hospitalization use between the United States and Taiwan.  The authors find the following:

“The rate of preventive care use is much higher in the USA than in Taiwan, whereas the use of hospital and emergency care is about the same. Results of our decomposition analysis suggest that higher levels of education and income, along with inferior health status in the USA, are significant factors, each explaining between 7% and 15% of the gap in preventive care use.”

Today I review some additional information about the Taiwanese health care system.  This information adds to my earlier review.

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Sigmoidoscopy: The colonoscopy’s cheaper, equally effective predecessor

August 23, 2010 in Physician Compensation, Prevention, Specialists | 1 comment

Physicians claims that colonoscopies are the gold standard of preventive medicine.  In 2008 the American Cancer Society deemed the colonoscopy as the preferred test and the health reform law (PPACA) will compel insurance companies to cover colonoscopies.  But does the sigmoidoscopy–the colonoscopy’s predecessor–offer less expensive, less invasive, equally effective preventive care?

“[The sigmoidoscopy] looks at only half the colon. In that test, there’s no sedation, no day off from work, no jug of laxatives the night before and maybe no gastroenterologist. Your primary care doctor could probably do the procedure himself…

Colonoscopy is three to four times more expensive than the simpler sigmoidoscopy test. And the risk of complication is seven times higher. Still the idea caught on. And as it did, it transformed the profession of gastroenterology. We went from too many specialists to a national shortage.”

In fact, the inventor of the colonoscopy, Al Neugut, wrote an editorial in the JAMA this summer stating that he regrets inventing the colonoscopy.  On Marketplace, Neugut said “If today, we were where we were in 1988, I would not institute colonoscopy based on the current evidence.”

The gold standard of preventive medicine may only be golden from the point of view of physician salaries.

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