Word: hmos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Like Donna and Larry Smith, both in their 50s, both career workers, both with HMOs. But when she got cancer and he had heart trouble, the bills mounted so fast that they had to sell their home and move to Denver into their daughter's basement. That humiliation saved them just enough money that they could spend the rest of their life savings on treatment and medication...
...birth of the privatized health system to Richard Nixon, who in 1971, on one of the White House tapes, noted that the scheme would work for insurance companies "because the less care they give 'em, the more money they make." Hardly anyone would deny that since then, the HMOs and pharmaceutical companies have made billions while Americans have health care below the standard of other industrialized countries, and pay more for it. (Even the flacks for HMOs acknowledge that the system needs reform.) Or that patients are routinely denied procedures they should be entitled to. "You're not slipping through...
...enormous effort is now made applying business methods to American medicine - making money by reducing what doctors and nurses do to flow charts. Thousands more business people every year make money "reducing costs" in medicine. It has worked out well for many; the CEO of one of our larger HMOs took home over a billion dollars last year. These people know they can slice up and squeeze the money out of the doctor-patient relationship only if it's reduced to a lifeless, mechanical emulation - an algorithm. But it's more complex and beautiful than those without feeling and judgment...
...HMOs tell us what to prescribe. They have lists of (cheap) drugs for which we don't have to spend hours filling out forms, and lists of (less cheap) drugs we can only get with forms, and lists of (not cheap) drugs they won't pay for no matter what...
...Hospitals tell us what to prescribe. They have formulary lists, somewhat like the HMOs, and contracts with equipment suppliers whose implants they force us to use. It is perhaps because of these strong voices that the reps are more effective. While those stern voices tell, the friendly pharma babe, just asking, is often a more forceful persuader...