About healthcaretownhall.com
February 17th, 2010
Milliman is hosting this blog to encourage an informed dialogue about healthcare reform. Healthcare is complicated, and there is no single, silver-bullet answer to the question of “How do we best improve the current system?” But thoughtful discussions will help move reform in the right direction and mend the fractured system.
We welcome your ideas and questions. In addition to posting comments on the blog, you can contact us via Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also email us at townhall@milliman.com.
Having worked in healthcare marketing for years I see two major problems:
1. Huge malpractice awards that drive up the cost of malpractice insurance, that drives up the cost of doing business in healthcare, that drives up the cost of receiving health care, that drives up the cost of health care insurance. (Why would any young person want to be a physician?) Cap the awards federally and force down the malp insurnance rates (they wouldn’t be justified with caps in place).
2. Selfreferrals to medical imaging. Studies show that when a provider gets their own imaging equipment (i.e., an oncologist getting a CT scanner), they order 70% more CTs! Some do it for increase revenue while others do it out of desperation to cover increasing overhead. It is not legal in some states and it should not be. Who owns imaging equipment should be closely regulated. Outpatient imaging centers run by radiologists and hospitals are plentiful in the U.S. There are few places that physicians need their own equipment. A few exceptions are obvious such as Ortho groups and Xray machines, etc. OB/GYNs do not need 4 full time ultraounds in operation so patients can see pretty 4D pictures of their fetus. We all survived for a few years without this luxury.