Word: careful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nevertheless, on balance, the combination of third parties paying most hospital bills and the noncompetitive nature of hospital care seems to have forced costs so completely out of control that, despite the obvious risks, only the Government may be able to clamp...
...desperate stab at trying to control the alarming rise in health costs. Carter's assumes passage of the hospital cost containment bill and it might also require that the fees charged by physicians be negotiated by the Secretary of HEW and a board composed of consumers, insurers and health care representatives. In essence, Kennedy advocates giving the Government veto power over payment scales worked out on a state basis through bargaining among the insured, the insurances, the doctors and hospitals...
...Some beginnings have been made: Blue Cross-Blue Shield will no longer automatically pay for a battery of tests administered to every patient who enters a hospital unless each test is specifically ordered by the attending physician. Insurance policies should be rewritten to pay for lab tests and other care administered in a doctor's office rather than a hospital. If Congress will not push the Blue plans and private insurers in this direction, corporations could and should. Exxon, General Motors and AT&T have the bargaining power that individual patients lack and a powerful incentive to hold down medical...
...become something of a whipping boy in the current cost-containment controversy, a symbol of the insanely soaring expenses of the U.S. medical care system. Government officials and consumers are questioning whether the benefits derived from the flood of innovative techniques of the past 20 years justify the high cost. Even physicians who traditionally have taken to the new technology with the enthusiasm of small boys trying out new toys, are voicing doubts...
...Intensive care units, whether for newborn infants, postsurgical patients or those with heart problems, provide, as the name implies, constant surveillance and therapy. Because they have the most sophisticated gadgetry outside the operating room and require a staff-to-patient ratio twice that needed elsewhere in the hospital, they are very expensive services to run. The intensive care unit accounts for about 15% of all hospital costs. Coronary care units may charge $400 to $500 a day. Yet, say some doctors, no one is sure whether survival rates are higher than would occur with care in regular hospital beds. Some...