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Too Profitable to Cure Brent Hoadley, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

Your insurance company, and mine, pay for these non-essential tests, then use the costs of paying for the tests to "justify" increasing insurance premiums. Is it any wonder that health care costs and insurance premiums are soaring? As a diabetic since 1955, 1 can remember sterilizing my glass syringes; using sterilized tongs to place the sterilized syringes and separate needles into sterilized stainless steel storage tubes.

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs Melody Petersen See book keywords and concepts

In Iowa many workers had watched their annual pay raises shrink or vanish altogether as employers cut their wage and salary budgets to pay for spiraling health insurance premiums. Even as they trimmed the size of annual raises, most companies also required their workers to pay a greater share of the health care bill in the form of higher monthly premiums and copays. Real incomes for many in the middle class were starting to decline. The consequences of the escalating medical costs did not end there.

To pay for rising health insurance premiums for employees, companies had been forced to raise the prices of their products so that everything from milk to machinery was more expensive. At General Motors, executives estimated that the company's health costs in 2004 accounted for $1,500 of the cost of each vehicle it manufactured. The auto executives said rising drug costs?1.5 billion for GM in 2004—were hurting American automakers'ability to compete with European and Asian manufacturers.

Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer Shannon Brownlee See book keywords and concepts

In consumer-driven plans, insurers offer lower health insurance premiums in return for high deductibles, on the order of four thousand dollars a year. The idea here is that if patients have more "skin in the game," or more of a financial stake in their care, they will pay more attention to cost and quality. In his slim and eloquent volume Escape Fire: Lessons for the Future of Health Care, Donald Berwick illustrates just how absurd it is to expect patients or their families to monitor their own care when they're in a hospital—even when a family member is a physician.

Private insurers could quietly pass on their rising costs to employers, who covered increasing insurance premiums by cutting back on wage increases that might otherwise have gone to employees. But Medicare's budget was in full view of Congress, taxpayers, and the administration. Even as inflation chilled in the early 1980s, an ominous thing happened: Medical costs, unlike most other prices, kept on rising. With its ideological preference for market-driven solutions, the Reagan administration was not about to approve price controls on hospital payments.

Embraced by employers and patients as a way to control double-digit increases in health insurance premiums, managed care did manage to rein costs in for a time. By the late 1990s, however, managed care was paradoxically encouraging doctors to provide unnecessary care, while simultaneously driving a wedge between patients and their physicians. But managed care's most devastating legacy is that it has damaged primary care, the backbone of the nation's health care system. Gordon Peabody grew up in Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, the son of a legal secretary and a clothing salesman.

Fee-for-service plans were an important part of the benefits package companies used to retain workers, but with the economy sagging and the price of health insurance premiums rising at double-digit rates, employers began putting pressure on insurers to get a grip on costs. Insurers had long known that the only health plans whose costs weren't going through the roof were the traditional health maintenance organizations, the true HMOs like Kaiser Permanente, in California and much of the West, and Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, in Seattle.

Timeless Secrets of Health & Rejuvenation: Unleash The Natural Healing Power That Lies Dormant Within You Andreas Moritz See book keywords and concepts

In 1976, Los Angeles County registered a sudden reduction of its death rate by eighteen percent when many medical doctors went on strike against the increase of health insurance premiums for malpractice. In a study by Dr. Milton Roemer from the University of California, Los Angeles, 17 of the largest hospitals in the county showed a total of 60 percent fewer operations during the period of the strike. When the doctors resumed work and medical activities went back to normal, death rates also returned to pre-strike levels. A similar event took place in Israel in 1973.

Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

As we write this, you pay $750 plus your insurance premiums while Uncle Sam kicks in $1,500 for your first $2,250 in medication bills. 7. Dodge the dastardly donut hole. Once your total medication bill reaches $2,250 for the year, you enter the "donut hole," where you are responsible for 100 percent of your medication costs. If you will probably spend less than $2,850 more for the rest of the year, consider buying from Canada. 8. Be vigilant when considering choosing a generic version of your prescription.

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels See book keywords and concepts

Exploding drug expenditures have helped produce double-digit increases in the costs of health insurance premiums, fueling further widespread anger towards the industry, particularly in the U.S. As a result, many doctors, scientists, health advocates, politicians, and medical journal editors are moving to try to wind back the industry's influence over scientific research and doctors" prescribing habits.16 The time is ripe to understand how that influence now extends right to the very definitions of disease.

Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda Jacky Law See book keywords and concepts

But unlike SSRIs, which are often paid via insurance premiums or general taxation and very convenient, changing the patterns of one's mind takes time, money and effort for the patient and many more headaches for those who must balance budgets. One reason the so-called talking cutes such as CBT are not more generally offered is because they are notoriously hard to evaluate and therefore get through the various reimbursement hurdles. SSRIs are as good as it gets in the surgery because they suit everyone. It is not entirely surprising therefore that people so readily colluded with pharma.

People were paying more out of their own pockets as a result of all this frenetic commercial activity, either through higher insurance premiums or because they were being asked to contribute more in so-called copayments. If they insisted on having the most expensive drugs, in other words, they had to pay for them. These were usually the ones the ads suggested they might benefit from. Pressure built up in every direction as governors joined in the anti-pharma fervour.

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism Marion Nestle See book keywords and concepts

Whatever the correct figure might be, it surely underestimates the costs to the victims in pain and inconvenience; to taxpayers in medical treatment for the indigent, higher health insurance premiums, public health surveillance systems, and investigations of outbreaks (estimated at $200,000 each); and to the food industry in plant closings, cleanup, and recalls as well as in legal fees, claim settlements, and higher insurance premiums.

The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing Gary Null and Amy McDonald See book keywords and concepts

Increased administrative costs to track that they have been given? There are many others, but I'll stop there. There are three things to take away from this introduction: 1. Low infection rates and high vaccination rates should not be the cornerstone of our public health policy. Vaccine reactions should not be discounted, whatever their numbers. Further, the true cost-benefit of the vaccination program must be considered, and what has been presented is barely the tip of the iceberg. 2. Parents, and all adults, must retain their right to refuse vaccines.

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism Marion Nestle See book keywords and concepts

Whatever the correct figure might be, it surely underestimates the costs to the victims in pain and inconvenience; to taxpayers in medical treatment for the indigent, higher health insurance premiums, public health surveillance systems, and investigations of outbreaks (estimated at $200,000 each); and to the food industry in plant closings, cleanup, and recalls as well as in legal fees, claim settlements, and higher insurance premiums.

Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele See book keywords and concepts

Of course, most doctors also are treated unfairly, compelled to pay exorbitant insurance premiums because of the actions of a few. This has led doctors in some states to go on strike while other physicians uproot their practices and move to less litigious communities. With fewer errors and thus fewer deaths, lawsuits would decline. Equally important, a national health care database would make it possible for the USCHC to identify those hospitals and health care workers—doctors, nurses, and technicians—who continue to be involved in mistakes and deaths.

The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers Katharine Greider See book keywords and concepts

Health insurance premiums have started to climb, rising sharply in 2000 (by 8 percent) and 2001 (12.5 percent). In a recent survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, one-third of all companies reported they were likely to raise employee costs for prescription drugs in 2003. Meanwhile, many "payers" are redesigning drug benefits in an attempt to stanch the bleeding. "HMOs are dropping or scaling back their drug coverage for Medicare beneficiaries who sign up," says Alan Sager, Ph.D.

Jim recently discovered his insurance premiums were going up to almost $700 a month; he just doesn't have the money, so he has dropped his prescription coverage. And what about the $900 monthly cost of his medicines? "I can't pay it," he says gloomily. "Luckily my doctor has been helping me out with some samples, but if those run out I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess I'll have to talk to him about getting rid of some of my prescriptions. Hopefully it won't kill me." And like his mom, Jim worries about his own son, twentyeight-year-old James W.

Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele See book keywords and concepts

Doctors who make mistake after mistake are seldom sanctioned, driving up the malpractice insurance premiums of all the good doctors. Hospitals charge the highest prices to those least able to pay. Not surprisingly, in a system so complicated and unwieldy, involving so much money, health care is riddled with fraud and abuse. Nursing homes bill Medicare for "therapy sessions" that consist of seating patients in front of a TV. When hospitals feed patients, they charge it off as "social skills group therapy sessions.

But don't look for the savings to show up in your health insurance premiums. Instead, the money will flow to the insurers' bottom line, and your premiums, co-pays, and deductibles will continue to spiral upward. As for the insurers, it's going to get even better, thanks to the information technology revolution. The next health care work expected to move offshore, notably, again, to India: the reading of mammograms, X-rays, and MRIs. Madison Avenue Med ach year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducts a nationwide survey on the medical well-being of the American people.

The paychecks of workers continue to shrink as they are compelled to pick up a larger share of health insurance premiums and co-pays. People with serious diseases are priced out of the insurance market. Companies tired of relentless health care cost increases are scaling back or canceling coverage for their employees and retirees. Saddest of all, the truly sick, the aged, the infirm, and families dealing with catastrophic illnesses are forced into poverty and bankruptcy.

The Rhodiola Revolution: Transform Your Health with the Herbal Breakthrough of the 21st Century Richard P. Brown, M.D., and Patricia L. Gerbarg, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

If just 70 percent of the 30 million American men with erectile dysfunction were to take Viagra once a week, the national cost would be $210 million a week—which probably would send insurance premiums through the roof! Even so, perhaps the most compelling reason to contemplate alternatives to Viagra is that the drug does absolutely nothing to boost sexual desire in men or women—a benefit that our favorite herb, Rhodiola rosea, is known for throughout Russia, Siberia, and other parts of Asia.

Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System J.D. Kleinke See book keywords and concepts

A more sensible approach would be to choose once and for all an unambiguous tax-status path, rationalizing the process of hospital charity care through one of two very different, major, uniform changes to the tax code: we convert all hospitals to for-profit status and use the new taxes we collect to fund government reimbursements directly (or even better, to fund health insurance premiums) for the uninsured, or we convert all hospitals to nonprofit status and mandate uniform levels of charity care as a percentage of total collected revenues.

One of the largest drivers of unaffordable health insurance premiums and still more uninsured people are high medical costs. These costs are continually driven up because of the boneheaded way in which we care for the uninsured, who cannot afford those premiums in the first place. Three days' worth of "emergent" inpatient dialysis costs seven times as much as routine dialysis, a cost borne by all of us in several ways: supplemental Medicare payments to University Hospital, government funding of residency training for Dr.

Cheaper insurance premiums for richer guaranteed benefits create one overriding imperative for the commercial HMO: it has every incentive to reduce costs, put the financial screws to Dr. Chang, contract with the cheapest hospitals in town, and micromanage every aspect of their clinical behavior. Enter stage right, the class-action lawyers who, like Louie in the film Casablanca, are shocked, shocked, to find economic motives impinging on professional behavior! The typical MCO's marketing puffery about providing "quality" health care is exactly that.

Based on what happens to premium rates every year, health care is crying out to fix this problem and eliminate this waste, the same way rises in auto insurance premiums set the stage for direct marketing by insurers like GEICO. If you think the Internet will change all of this, think again. In 2000, PacifiCare announced that it would offer its HMO plan directly to small employers over the Internet if they chose to sign up on-line, thus minimizing the brokers' administrative role.

Our desire to pay for better medical care with tax-free dollars—and tax dollars themselves—is a central tenet of American public health policy and social beliefs; it provides a rationale for the continued tax deductibility of health insurance premiums and other expenses for those fortunate enough to have job-based health benefits. The biggest problem arises when the shipyard boss—fed up with high costs and the failure of the MCO he hired to managed those costs—stops paying for his workers' medical care.

Making Them Pay: How to Get the Most from Health Insurance and Managed Care Rhonda D. Orin See book keywords and concepts

A prime reason behind the boom in managed care is the desire to reduce health insurance premiums. Employers keep their premiums low by keeping health care costs down. They may not want you to know about mandatory-benefit laws that give you the right to demand additional benefits. At least theoretically, those same benefits could drive up next year's premium. Ironically, even the state legislators who passed these mandatory-benefit laws may have difficulty educating the public about them. These laws often contain many technical twists and turns.

This is different, for one thing, because third parties are heavily involved; it's the patients, after all, who pay the insurance premiums and who receive the services for which the rates are set. It's also different because terms like "usual and customary" sound, at least to laymen, as though the rates accurately reflect the fees that actually are paid in circumstances outside of the network. These terms do not reveal the practical reality, which seems to be that these rates are little more than contract terms set by the insurer as a condition for being in the network.

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