Word: hmos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...average wholesale prices (AWP), which the U.S. government uses to determine what it pays for drugs, and using the extra money to pay commissions to doctors who prescribe their products. Activists and state attorneys general say the AWP, set by the companies, rarely reflects the prices charged to HMOs and other drug wholesalers. "What we say is that AWP stands for 'ain't what's paid,'" says Ahaviah Glaser, director of the Prescription Access Litigation Project...
...political activist with a track record for sensationalism." PhRMA went on to say "a review of America's health care system should be balanced, thoughtful and well-researched" before adding, "Unfortunately, you won't get that from Michael Moore." America's Health Insurance Plans, whose members include HMOs Aetna and Cigna, handed its own news releases last week emphasizing the need for "a uniquely American solution." Health Care America, a non-profit financed in part by pharmaceutical and hospital companies, held briefings to document the the long wait-times common to government-run healthcare, such as those run by France...
...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...