Freedomain Radio

It's no "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" but it's definitely up there on the irony scale.  Nice handwriting, at least.

nathanm:

It's no "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" but it's definitely up there on the irony scale.  Nice handwriting, at least.

My favourites are "Death to those who say islam is violent" and "Death to all the juice"

Texas doctors opting out of Medicare at alarming rate

“The only way to provide cost-effective care is outside the Medicare system, a system without constant paperwork and headaches and inadequate reimbursement.”

Doctors Threaten to Pull Out of Texas Medicaid

About 3.3 million poor and disabled Texans depend on Medicaid for health care, but less than a third of the state's 48,700 practicing doctors accept patients covered by the federal program, according to Texas Health and Human Services Commission. And some doctors who do participate in the program limit the number and kind of patients they accept.

Massive healthcare fraud scheme uncovered in Miami

The top two officials of a leading chain of community mental health centers were among four people arrested in Miami on Thursday in connection with a scheme involving about $200 million in fraudulent medical claims...

. . .

The Medicare fraud described in the indictment was even bigger than that of an Armenian-American crime group charged in New York last week with operating phantom healthcare clinics that tried to cheat the federal program out up to $163 million.

Funny how aggressive they get when someone tries to steal the stolen loot

OutSider:

Holy shit!  My mind almost worm-holed back into itself.  

When I see this all I can think of is the voice of HAL 9000 saying, "I'm sorry, Dave.  I can not do that."  You kind of have to watch the crappy sequel 2010 to find out why HAL went homicidal to get the joke.

Alan Chapman:

Texas doctors opting out of Medicare at alarming rate

“The only way to provide cost-effective care is outside the Medicare system, a system without constant paperwork and headaches and inadequate reimbursement.”

The thing about Medicare is not only that it pays an arbitrary rate and requires massive paperwork, but it also forces its way into a doctor's non-Medicare practice and controls the prices he charges for those patients, too.  Medicare has "non-discrimination" requirements, which means that the arbitrary Medicare price becomes the mandated price for all of a doctor's patients.  It's insidious. 

The medical industry was all too eager get into bed with the politicians.  After security, arbitration, banking and roads, the medical care industry was next in line asking for special protection and privileges from the statists.  Now that they are being eaten, they're complaining.

Any time the government offers to pay for something, special interest groups lobby to be covered by the program which is why government continually grows and costs spiral out of control. Once a program gets entrenched and people receive benefits, it's nearly impossible to reduce or abolish it.

Doctors brace for possible big Medicare pay cuts

Breast cancer surgeon Kathryn Wagner has posted a warning in her waiting room about a different sort of risk to patients' health: She'll stop taking new Medicare cases if Congress allows looming cuts in doctors' pay to go through.

The potential cuts have raised alarms that real damage to Medicare could result if the lame-duck Congress winds up in a partisan standoff and fails to act by Dec. 1, when an initial 23 percent reduction would hit.

"My frustration level is at a nine or 10 right now," said Wagner, who practices in San Antonio. "I am exceptionally exhausted with these annual and biannual threats to cut my reimbursement by drastic amounts. As a business person, I can't budget at all because I have no idea how much money is going to come in. Medicine is a business. Private practice is a business."

Ha!  That is great.  Lately I've heard radio ads about "reporting medicare fraud."  They have a hotline that you can call to report said fraud.  I was considering calling it to report that medicare itself is fraud.

Study: Treatment mistakes for 1 in 7 hospitalized Medicare patients

The report cites a variety of "adverse events" or causes for treatment errors, including excessive bleeding after surgery, urinary tract infections linked to catheters and incorrect medications. Researchers estimate that these types of adverse events contribute to 15,000 deaths per month or 180,000 deaths each year...

Man Denied Life-Saving Liver Transplant Because of Cuts in Arizona’s Medicaid Program

Arizona's Medicaid agency announced earlier this year that it would no longer cover liver transplants for Hepatitis C patients, a move blasted at the time as "a death sentence" by one patient advocacy group. And now a Hep-C patient has been denied a life-saving liver transplant because he couldn’t afford to pay for it himself.

According to the Arizona Republic, 32-year-old Francisco Felix was in the hospital, ready to receive a liver that was donated to him late Monday night. But the liver went to someone else Tuesday morning because Felix couldn't find $200,000 overnight to pay for the transplant.

111 charged in Medicare scams worth $225 million

More than 700 law enforcement agents fanned out to arrest 111 people accused of illegally billing Medicare more than $2225 million. The arrests are the latest in a string of major busts in the past two years as authorities have struggled to pare the fraud that's believed to cost...between $60 billion and $90 billion each year.

I once handled a case for a nursing home provider that was being criminally investigated for Medicare fraud.  There was a big push by the Clinton administration to "do something" about the rampant fraud, which I guess has been going on since 5 minutes after Medicare was enacted. 

Apparently, these facilities don't bill Medicare for each service or occupant, but rather bill Medicare for their overall expenses -- all electricity, water, employees, rent, etc. Naturally, these global operating expenses just go up and up and up, and they hide all sorts of little extra expenses that the facility operators can bury in the account statements. 

In my little case, the result of the federal investigation was the discovery that the business manager of the facility had deposited money into the employees' retirement fund a few days later than scehduled, on three occasions, for a total of about 9 days of delay.  As a result, the retirement fund lost about $80 that it otherwise would have earned if the deposits had been made on time, although Medicare was billed for the full amount, including the extra $80.  It cost the client about $50,000 in legal fees, plus the time of the G-man investigator and a team of forensic accountants, to uncover this Crime of the Century. 

Being government investigators, they had no price signals to know what they ought to pay to chase an $80 accounting error. It cost them nothing to spend their time on this matter.

Meanwhile, Medicare was paying the facility about $500 a day for each patient's room, which you could get anywhere else in that area for about $500 per month.  Medicare paid for all the elder care services and employees and supplies on top of that. That fraud was perfectly legal, however, according to the Alice-in-Wonderland world we live in.

It was then that I realized I was in the wrong business.