The Weekly Addresses
President Obama on America’s Resurgence
His Press Conference yesterday:
Governor Markell:
West Wing Week:
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President Obama on America’s Resurgence
His Press Conference yesterday:
Governor Markell:
West Wing Week:
Connect with us on the following social media platforms.
The healthcare innovation that Governor Markell is so busy celebrating is really the Highmark push toward so-called patient-centered medical homes, a practice designed to (a) increase profits; (b) lower costs by restricting services [your primary care physician will have the right–and be expected to–overrule your specialist physician]; and (c) to drive a variety of non-Highmark associated small businesses (primarily those who provide medical records and billing services) under.
As for the patients and their premiums, nowhere this has been implemented has it statistically improved outcomes or reduced premiums. It has, however, improved profits for the insurance companies.
If the PCHM is paid for by your insurance, then Highmark is still obligated to spend 80% of your premium on health care. PCHM or no, insurance companies still only have the 20% pool to pay for their overhead and profits.
PCHMs aren’t especially new — the idea is to pay doctors based on outcomes rather than for volume of services. Geisinger’s ProvenCare seems to be the model most folks are looking at. But the idea behind these is to control the inflation of health care costs, not to increase premiums. There’s some data on early models (compiled by what looks like an industry group), but even the CDC notes there hasn’t been enough to definitively know about long term outcomes and cost control. Implemented badly, this could become the Revenge of HMOs, but it doesn’t make sense to assign nefarious profit motives, when the pool of money available for profits doesn’t change with this model.
AND let’s note that President Obama only called on female reporters in his briefing yesterday, dissing all of those Chuck Todd wannabes.
cassandra
I cannot do it right now but later I will show you a raft of recent studies suggesting just the opposite, that the PCMH is in fact another device to improve the monopolistic position of mega health insurance corporations. Might not be till tomorrow or even Monday, sorry … but real life.
What the PCMH might do, really, is improve the fortunes of the hospital systems out there who are starting their own insurance companies — to cut out the middleman, as it were. But most insurance companies are already of the Too Big to Fail category, given the PCMH payment strategy, it is hard to see that helping them at all.