Tag: system

Healthcare tourism is the symptom of a damaged U.S. healthcare system

Vera

The tragedy involving 4 Us residents who were lately kidnapped — and two of them murdered — whilst in search of beauty surgical procedures in Mexico has renewed the dialogue of “medical tourism,” a expression that, in my intellect, implies that their vacation was recreational and enjoyable. I desire the term “outward clinical travel” and would argue that these Americans’ journey abroad need to remind us of how inaccessible wellbeing treatment is listed here and the lengths to which people today will go to get the treatment they want or will need.

I like the phrase “outward medical travel” and argue that their journey overseas need to remind us of how inaccessible health treatment is listed here.

It’s not just about plastic operation: Us citizens go wanting for a extensive vary of treatments abroad, from dental care and hip replacements to fertility therapies, organ transplants and cardiovascular care. For the 30 million Americans with no wellbeing coverage, this sort of strategies may possibly be out of their selling price variety right here in the States.

And even those people who have insurance policies may perhaps find that they can get the treatment they request much less expensive or more promptly in yet another state. 

A root canal in Hungary or Vietnam, for illustration, might be a quarter of the price of the technique in the U.S. The exact same goes for an angioplasty in Malaysia. 

My cousin, Jessica Koller Gorham, a bariatric surgeon at Ochsner Health in New Orleans, advised me Louisiana’s point out prepare only handles bariatric surgical procedure for 300 state approach-insured personnel for each 12 months for the full point out. The ready listing for fat-loss medical procedures, now three years lengthy, is rising. “It’s insanity,” she said. “And so what do some of these folks do? Mexico is not significantly away.” Traveling for healthcare treatment is generally a desperate measure for all those who have tried the typical route and discovered only barriers.

Having said that, outward health care vacation can have many challenges. Top quality and safety requirements, licensure, credentialing and medical standards for getting strategies are not reliable throughout nations around the world and hospitals. If surgical procedures are executed in substandard circumstances, for illustration, the threat of inadequate effects or problems is larger. Some people may possibly depart the U.S. trying to find therapies that have not been approved in the

… Read More

What Does a Good Health-Care System Look Like?

Vera

I make a good living. I should have a larger retirement portfolio than I do, as my husband and I keep our living expenses within bounds, and I am a moderately successful self-employed professional. However, every few years, or sometimes a few years in a row, I find our household being bankrupted by the medical-industrial complex.  

This year has been uniquely devastating. My husband is a 75-year-old bone-cancer survivor. Two years of radical chemotherapy left him with a suppressed immune system, which means for most of the pandemic we’ve been hiding from people the way Gremlins hide from sunlight.

A few years ago he had a two-year bout of C. diff, for which the drugs cost thousands. He finally beat it.

A long-term result of the C. diff left him with bacteria in his teeth and gums, which resulted in him needing $25,000 worth of dental work. He lost his upper teeth, now has upper dentures, and had serious gum work done on all his bottom teeth. Medicare covered a tiny bit of this. Dental work is not considered worthy of proper insurance in this country. And without the dental care he would have developed sepsis and died.

This cost was on top of his Medicare deduction from his Social Security and his $471-per-month drug-plan copay.

We’ve had some truly INCOMPETENT primary-care physicians over the years.  We found a great doctor in 2006. He was an independent. Didn’t take insurance. Fee for service. Had studied at Loma Linda hospital. Great credentials. Finally a great primary-care physician. His wife, a Harvard-trained attorney who had retired from the law, ran his practice. Well, with the COVID pandemic, his wife burned out on medical administration, partly from all of the death they had to deal with. And she had a few COVID deaths in her own family. With his wife retiring from medical administration, he joined a boutique primary-care practice starting January 1, 2022. He’s no longer fee-for-service.  He went concierge. He takes insurance now. But the annual “concierge fee” for 2022 was $3,000 per patient per year. It is going up to $4,000 per patient for 2023.

Then there are MY medical costs. My insurance is $1,189 per month for second-from-top-level insurance. It goes up 14 percent next year. I have arthritic knees from being a 10-to-15-mile-a-week runner from my late teens to early 30s. At 6 foot 1, I am a

… Read More

To prevent medical debt, the U.S. could learn from Germany’s health care system : Shots

Vera

Dr. Eckart Rolshoven examines a patient at his clinic in Püttlingen, a small town in Germany’s Saarland region. Although Germany has a largely private health care system, patients pay nothing out-of-pocket when they come to see him.

Pasquale D’Angiolillo for KHN


hide caption

toggle caption

Pasquale D’Angiolillo for KHN

Dr. Eckart Rolshoven examines a patient at his clinic in Püttlingen, a small town in Germany’s Saarland region. Although Germany has a largely private health care system, patients pay nothing out-of-pocket when they come to see him.

Pasquale D’Angiolillo for KHN

PÜTTLINGEN, Germany — Almost every day, Dr. Eckart Rolshoven sees the long shadow of coal mining in his clinic near the big brownstone church that dominates this small town in Germany’s Saarland.

The region’s last-operating coal shaft, just a few miles away, closed a decade ago, ending centuries of mining in the Saarland, a mostly rural state tucked between the Rhine River and the French border. But the mines left a difficult legacy, as they have in coal regions in the United States, including West Virginia.

Many of Rolshoven’s patients battle lung diseases and chronic pain from years of work underground. “We had an industry with a lot of illnesses,” said Rolshoven, a genial primary care physician who at 71 is nearing the end of a long career.

The Saarland’s residents are sicker than elsewhere in Germany. And like West Virginia, the region faces economic hurdles. For decades, German politicians, business leaders and unions have labored to adjust to the mining industry’s slow demise.

Diagnosis: Debt

How banks and hospitals are cashing in when patients can't pay for health care

But this is a healthier place than West Virginia in many respects. The region’s residents are less likely to die prematurely, data shows. And on average, they live four years longer than West Virginians.

There is another important difference between this former coal territory and its Appalachian counterpart: West Virginia’s economic struggles have been compounded by medical debt, a burden that affects about 100 million people in the U.S. — in no state more than West Virginia.

In the Saarland, medical debt is practically nonexistent. It’s so rare in Germany that the federal government’s statistical office doesn’t even track it.

The reason isn’t government health care. Germany, like the U.S., has a largely private health care system that relies on private doctors and private insurers. Like Americans, many Germans enroll in a health plan through work, splitting the cost with their employer.

But Germany has

… Read More

Employees Shortages Choking U.S. Health and fitness Treatment System | Healthiest Communities Wellbeing Information

Vera

As the pandemic stretches on with no clear conclusion in sight, one particular of the most important unanswered queries is what this expertise has meant, and ultimately will indicate, for individuals who’ve been on the front strains through – the nation’s health and fitness care workforce – and the clients they serve.

An approximated 1.5 million health and fitness treatment work opportunities had been misplaced in the initially two months of COVID-19 as the country raced to curb the novel coronavirus by temporarily closing clinics and restricting non-crisis companies at U.S. hospitals. Nevertheless numerous of all those work opportunities have because returned, overall health care employment continues to be below pre-pandemic levels, with the range of staff down by 1.1%, or 176,000, in comparison to February 2020, for every the U.S. Bureau of Labor Studies.

Yet the need to have for health treatment employees has by no means been greater. Staffing shortages are now the nation’s top patient protection worry, forcing People in america to endure longer wait times when looking for care “even in everyday living-threatening emergencies,” or to be turned absent solely, according to ECRI, a nonprofit affected person security corporation.

In a letter sent in March to the Household Power and Commerce Committee, the American Hospital Affiliation termed the workforce shortage hospitals were being going through a “national unexpected emergency,” projecting the over-all shortage of nurses to achieve 1.1 million by the close of the year. And it’s not just nurses: Industry experts from health care lab staff to paramedics are in short source.

The results are currently being felt in the course of the total care continuum. In specific elements of the country, full hospitals and health care departments have shuttered amid this sort of shortfalls, leaving individuals with fewer entry to important well being care, together with labor and shipping and delivery providers and inpatient care for kids.

With much less clinicians doing work in the discipline, practitioners are locating on their own liable for a larger variety of patients, fueling soaring burnout levels that professionals say increase the threat of health care errors and, consequently, likely hurt to Individuals. The number of central line-affiliated bloodstream bacterial infections increased 28% in the second quarter of 2020 in contrast to the exact time period in 2019, according to the New England Journal of Medication, while fees of falls rose by 17% and tension injuries

… Read More

Balanced Ageing For More mature Adults Facilitated By Electronic Exercise System

Vera

Exercising is essential for healthy getting old. It can aid protect against heart ailment, strokes, and diabetes and improves the immune program. Functioning out can reduce your threat of falls. Since it creates endorphins, it can also improve your mental health. Two 31-yr-previous techies, Katie Reed and Kelly Froelich, begun Well balanced, a digital physical fitness application so more mature older people, like their grandparents, can personalize exercising routines to defend versus injuries, suffering points, and disease and achieve their personalized targets these as bettering harmony, bone density, versatility, or muscle mass.

The pair are moving absent from aged-fashioned labels like senior, elderly, and silver to describe the demographic and the solutions aimed at them. Importantly, training for older adults is not being dealt with like a prescription or medication it is really enjoyment! Their information resonated with buyers, and Reed and Froelich raised $6.5 million in pre-seed and seed rounds.

“I grew up with my grandparents in Palm Springs, CA,” mentioned Reed. “My grandfather exercised every single morning.” He is one particular of the inspirations for the startup.

When Covid-19 hit the U.S., and social distancing mandates began, Reed labored at Ro, a healthtech startup, as an engineer supervisor. Rather of doing work from household, she packed her luggage to be with her grandmother. Her grandfather experienced not long ago handed away from most cancers. Reed wished to guidance her grandmother as she rebuilt her id with no her husband.

Being aware of that training was crucial to her bodily and psychological overall health, Reed accessed online physical fitness programs such as Peloton, Obe, and CorePower. These one-dimensions-matches-all exercise sessions were being fantastic for her but couldn’t be custom made to her grandmother. For the duration of a catchup phone with coworker Froelich—who is also a licensed private trainer specializing in teaching seniors—Reed located out that Froelich was virtually instruction her grandparents with cardio boxing over FaceTime.

“The light bulb went off [in my head],” explained Reed. Numerous elements led her to conclude that this was the one second for Well balanced, a electronic health system for healthful growing older.

  • Throughout the pandemic, more mature grownups became a lot more tech-savvy. 4 out of five grown ups age 50+ depend on technology to
… Read More

COVID-19 Pandemic’s Effect on Overall health Treatment System Documented in Good Wellness Report

Vera

A new Honest Overall health white paper made up of the fifth yearly version of FH Healthcare Indicators and FH Medical Cost Index was launched, displaying a extraordinary increase in telehealth utilization from 2019 to 2020.

Telehealth utilization grew nationally 7060% from 2019 to 2020 (Determine 1), an increase driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions imposed on certain in-workplace providers, coupled with the bigger possibility of infection from in-particular person encounters. This is among the results in a new Truthful Health and fitness white paper containing the fifth annual version of FH Healthcare Indicators and FH Health-related Rate Index. Like the preceding editions, this year’s edition of FH Healthcare Indicators and FH Clinical Cost Index is supposed to give clarity to all well being treatment stakeholders in a quickly shifting healthcare atmosphere.

FH Health care Indicators

FH Healthcare Indicators expose traits and patterns in the areas where by patients get overall health care. Focusing on choice destinations of service—retail clinics, urgent treatment centers, telehealth, and ambulatory surgical procedures centers (ASCs)—as very well as unexpected emergency rooms (ERs), FH Healthcare Indicators appraise changes in utilization, geographic and demographic aspects, diagnoses, processes, and expenses.

Among the other key results:

  1. Telehealth utilization enhanced nationally 41,919% from 2015 to 2020, a more than 40-fold improve over the advancement of 1019% percent from 2014 to 2019 claimed in final year’s edition.
  2. In all other places of company studied for improvements in utilization, utilization diminished from 2019 to 2020, likely due to the influence of COVID-19. Utilization fell 38% in ASCs, 30% in ERs, 16% in urgent care centers, and 4% in retail clinics.
  3. In 2020 as in previous a long time, more assert lines were being submitted for females than males in most age teams in the locations of company in which Fair Wellbeing analyzed gender-linked patterns—retail clinics, urgent care facilities, telehealth, ASCs, and ERs.
  4. On the other hand, in some sites of assistance, these as retail clinics, urgent care centers, ASCs, and ERs, the gap between males and women narrowed. For instance, in ERs, in the age team 61-70, the male and woman shares had been about equal (50%) in 2020, a alter from 2019, when the woman share had been 52% and the male share 48%. This craze bears checking in the upcoming.
  5. In 2020, publicity to communicable conditions joined the list of the most typical diagnostic groups in
… Read More