Word: floridas
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Hurricanes and housing busts have already battered South Florida's image as an earthly paradise. But Miami's reputation for dysfunction is on display again this spring as the Obama Administration shifts health-care reform into high gear - and a spate of studies slams the Magic City as the poster child for exorbitant medical costs. This week the Milliman Medical Cost Index listed the 2008 average private-provider costs for a Miami family of four - $20,282 - as the highest among the 14 major U.S. cities it studied, adding that more than 40% of that amount came out of Miamians...
...Miami's cost problem isn't a medical supply-and-demand issue. In fact, it's just the opposite, says Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. As a result of the deluge of doctors and hospitals that have moved to the retiree mecca since the 1960s and '70s, chasing the lucrative Medicare business as well as the area's population boom, South Florida has an "excess capacity of health-care providers and institutions," Quick notes. And to make sure they all get a piece of the action, they've created a wasteful and ill-coordinated...
...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...
...Miami man wanted by the FBI for allegedly submitting more than $10 million in false claims for his Hialeah medical-supply company. Last month the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that while only 2% of the nation's Medicare recipients live in South Florida, the area received the highest reimbursements for medical supplies like inhalation drugs - about 20% more than the second highest recipient area, Cook County, Ill., which contains Chicago and is itself no slouch when it comes to fraud of this type. Florida Senator Mel Martinez, the ranking Republican on the Special Committee on Aging...
...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...