How Do We Increase the Patient’s Ability to Shop?
Forbes magazine’s medicare piece on how medical costs increase due to corporate lobbying for CT scanning coverage that drives equipment sales, reveals the market’s reaction:
Congress: “…tried to rope in runaway Medicare costs by dramatically cutting imaging payments in outpatient settings…”
Private Insurers: “…Companies like CareCore Radiology, American Imaging Management and National Imaging Associates cropped up to do the dirty work of reviewing and rejecting imaging orders on behalf of insurance companies…CareCore’s research shows a doctor who owns his own machine is four times as likely to order a scan as a doctor who doesn’t.”
GE:”…a lot of the arguments against imaging are bogus.”
Where does this leave the patient who is trying to inject competition into the process to lower prices? The bottom line appears to be the doctor-patient relationship- the patient must select doctors that they can trust to make the right decisions, not ones to simply increase business.
Do you feel that you can form a relationship with your doctor to get the right amount of tests and care? How else can we determine if a doctor is simply prescribing treatments to make more money? Is the whole process too difficult for the patient to control and make it competitive?
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Tags: competition, CT scanning, doctors, innovation, medical care, medicare, strategyRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Solutions and Trends Requiring Projects
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