Increasing ED costs are concerning, but we have to be very careful of potentially dangerous solutions: http://time.com/5017365/insurance-er-visits-patient-decide/ …
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I’m planning to make my next ER story about these insurance denials. Agree it’s important to show multiple sides of the issue - and am trying to find patients already who have run into problems being turned away.
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I've known a hundred ER docs in my career, and only 2 or 3 of them were ever as greedy as the billing companies. This corruption is fundamentally due to E&M coding, a dingbat invention of the 90s.http://bit.ly/1PM8o0n
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Published 6 months before my internship.
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It's all better now, right?

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I've been called that only once before, and I did not realize it was a compliment.

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It was meant to be
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Bob Berenson, CMS director at the time, to this day wonders why we put up with it.http://bit.ly/1EX63Kr
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Keeping an ER open is expensive and many costs are fixed. Can't reduce hours or services. If # of visits go down because simple cases now handled elsewhere (as they should be), prices need to rise. Doesn't explain steep rise in total spend, esp. as # of hospitals is declining.
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True, but things like this can be fixed with better budgeting (factoring equipment leases vs purchases, flex time, efficient triage practices). The problem is that many hospitals boards bring in MBAs, etc who focus on the bottom line rather than understanding processes.
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Absolutely, which account for higher prices. Hospitals have no choice but to charge high rates given insurance companies have far too much control over what they choose to reimburse. Hospitals rarely recoup the costs incurred.
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Thanks for the attention to neglected corner of medicine, Sarah. Re: cost growth, better resource=http://bit.ly/2BHO5yY . Regarding number of visits, see http://bit.ly/2AMsrfi . HCCI total is off by factor of 10, and NCHS data=>ED visit vol increase continues.
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Here are most recent NCHS ED volume estimates: http://bit.ly/2jMoD34 And here correction of bad cost growth link JAMA 2017;318:1668 Dieleman et al.
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this has 102B for ED spending http://ihmeuw.org/49qt (it's the interactive version of the chart here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2594716 …)
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Yep, out of 2 trillion = 5%
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This is a survival game by many rural hospitals. Urgent care and community health centers have put the squeeze on them for less-critical "emergency" care that isn't, but pays the night bills. Maybe fund 24-hr care directly rather than make them "earn" it?
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Ummm...those “visits to the ER” is off by more than a factor of 10
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Per HCUP (cited in the graph), there were 137.8 million ED visits in 2014, a 14.8% increase from 2006. Where did you get these numbers from? https://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb227-Emergency-Department-Visit-Trends.pdf …
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