Word: pollack
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...skimpy insurance umbrella under which the ghetto poor live does not mean that needy patients must sometimes forego care; there is a more subtle and more debilitating disadvantage as well. Jerome Pollack, executive director of the Med School's health plan, said last week that "since the supply of doctors here is limited, the poor actually have to compete with the affluent for available care. In effect, private insurance may deprive low-income areas of care by attracting doctors into the well-insured areas...
From the basic plan of regular examinations, a series of baroque innovations is possible. Pollack says that the health centers may develop a data bank with vast amounts of data on thousands of patients. "From this data base," he says, 'we can get a reading of the tests end eventually use test results as a predictive medium...
...Pollack doesn't contend that outpatient care can be a complete substitute for hospitalization. The health plan won't try to perform surgery in back rooms of its health center. But Pollack claims that about one third of the patients in a hospital on any given day do not medically need to be there. They no longer need the 24-hours care the hospital provides; and if adequate outpatient clinics were available, the patients could recover at home, making occasional visits to the clinics...
...some liberal observers se the health plan, however, all these efficiencies still leave some gaps. The plan's new benefits seem to be aimed at the same middle-class consumers who now buy medical insurance through private agencies. The similarity is no accident; Pollack says that the plan was deliberately contrived to work within the existing private carriers. But some critics have charged that this plan really doesn't solve the distribution dilemma: it offers better service to America's insurance-buying suburbanites, but it seems to turn down the urban an rural who can never scrape together insurance premium...
This is where the health plan's projections for enrolling Roxury's poor become important. Tomorrow's installment will discuss how the poor will be covered at Harvard; why Pollack thinks a mixed middle-class/poor clientele is better than a program aimed only at the needy; how Harvard hopes to set a precedent for the nation; and how the Harvard Health project came into being...