Word: careful
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...have a mile-long to-do list that includes items such as "Get blood pressure and cholesterol checked" and "Start walking 20 minutes per day." Who knows when you'll get around to all that? But if your employer offered to pay you cold, hard cash for taking better care of yourself, you'd probably start right...
...What Miami does have a shortage of is primary-care physicians - and that comparative lack of preventive care has created too much reliance on more expensive specialized and emergency care. To its credit, Florida has begun to address the problem by making primary care a focus of the new medical school at Miami's Florida International University. But a bigger problem is Florida's refusal to require its doctors to carry malpractice insurance - a major concern given how lax the state's medical-practice standards have been historically. More than a third of South Florida's physicians are uninsured, largely...
...Reports like the Milliman Index, however, point up the just as troubling relation between high health-care costs and low-wage demographics like Miami's. Cities and regions with higher income and education rates tend to have access to more efficient health-care plans. In turn, they bear health-care costs that, while they might seem high in places like New York City (which is second behind Miami in the Milliman Index), are usually more in line with what residents can afford and require relatively less out-of-pocket contributions. Locales like Miami, by contrast, often offer residents "less access...
...result, Congress is looking into solutions like health-care-coverage premium subsidies for lower-income Americans. But that still won't address the out-of-control health-care costs in areas like South Florida. This month Medicare chose Miami as one of 14 cities to take part in a project to reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions. And because South Florida's population is largely elderly, more local health-care reformers are urging doctors and hospitals to examine costly and often pointless treatment for dying patients. A 2008 Dartmouth study suggested that South Florida hospitals generate especially high bills for such cases...
...Fitch of Milliman notes, the most urgent prescription is to get payers and providers in cities like Miami "to be more penalized and incentivized" on the cost-savings front. Even if health-care plans stopped paying hospitals for unnecessary inpatient stays, others says, that kind of abuse still won't end if the plans don't also stop paying patients' doctors for visits during those stays - a major moneymaker for physicians. Those doctors should instead be motivated, financially or otherwise, by plans to focus more on preventive health-care treatments. Either way, when it comes to reforming health-care albatrosses...