Tag Archives: costs

Isn’t there an easier way?

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Yesterday, we discussed indemnity, catastrophic, and conventional health care plans. One of the primary reasons to have a health care plan is to be able to get lower prices for each service that may be needed.  Without such a plan, you pay what the provider wants- or get sued.  The difference in pricing can be 90%.  It is routine for me to see an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) detailing a bill that came in as $ 7244, was considered to be $ 1200 once reduced by my insurance carrier,  and for my share of the costs to be only $ 50 or so.

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Indemnity my a..

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Oh, I know, you’ve heard that some folks’ insurance bill have escalated.  I will not deny that changing from a catastrophic-coverage plan to a real health care plan is not more (even much more) expensive- but in the grand scheme of things for all citizens, that is not a big change.  Because most Americans get their health care insurance at work.

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Healthcare Cost Spiral

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It’s hard to believe how different health care is than normal technology.  When we are dealing with computers, automobiles or other technology, things get cheaper and more efficient with time.  In health care, new innovations either make things possible- sometimes at lower costs, but just as often these developments just cost more money.  Which is why health care comprises some 20% of our GDP.

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Are you ready?

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Every business is different.  Yet, every business has many, many similar components.  Serving as the CEO for jewelry manufacturing venture is different from serving as the CEO for a dialysis clinic- and different still from being the managing director for a law firm.  Right now, I am considering whether I wish to help start- and then manage a new health care clinic- one with a business model that will be radically different than what is normally seen.

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Today is the day!

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Today is the day… One that will probably match the revolution in health care that arose almost 50 years ago. That was Medicare. This one, which will be revised as often and for the same reasons that we refined Medicare- is popularly (or is that infamously) known as Obamacare (PPACA is the legal abbreaviation for the act.)

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The Sky is Falling! Really?

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Here it comes again! On 1 July, CMMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) proposed cutting the payment of dialysis allocations by 12%. (For those of you not well versed in math- that’s about a 1/8 cut.) But, that’s not quite right, since they also offered a 2.6% increase in the “bundle” payment rate, so the cut comes to about $ 24 less per treatment.

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A Microbial Battery For Waste Treatment?

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I’ve written beforeabout methods and processes to treat wastewater  (here and here, for starters- you can find more by searching the index to the right for wastewater)- including methods that may be able to provide power to attenuate the costs of such treatment. Now, another concept to employ microbes to generate electricity has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (right now, it’s ahead of print) describing work being done by Dr. Craig Criddle’s group at Stanford.

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Biofarming- with some great new twists!

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Many of you know that I have been working with water reuse systems for some four decades now. One of the first projects was the development (and sale) of a home wastewater recycling system. During it’s development, we found that certain high use conditions led to a buildup of ammonia in the returning (clean) wastewater to the toilet. Trust me, there are only so many times you can tell the homeowner that the ammonia smell means their toilet bowl is clean. (If you must know, once was about the limit!)

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