My fantasy is that we all get together to form a Dr/patients association and conspire against the insurance companies.
n From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Pamela McCorduck Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 1:33 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Old Folks Only: Medicare & Plan F Robert, nearly none of my Manhattan doctors takes Medicare, and that's been true for about a decade. Luckily, Joe is still working, and we pay for the Columbia faculty medical plan, but when that stops, I don't know what we'll do. I can't blame the docs--the fees from Medicare are negligible compared to Manhattan expenses. Free market medicine working so, so well. What you're complaining about, Nick (and I agree) is a result of docs taking on far too many patients, giving them too little time, again a function of the crackpot non-system we have. With single-payer, we would immediately save thirty percent at least of what we shell out, and patients and doctors could split that savings. As most of you know, we are surrounded in Santa Fe by people who have no insurance at all. I had dinner the other night with the guy in charge of Google's medical records effort... Google's defunct medical records effort. As they were getting acquainted with the general non-system, they realized that privacy laws would keep them from verifying that their record-keeping programs actually worked! Impossible to penetrate the silos that exist from one medical center to the next. Google pulled the plug. Is it do-able technically? Of course. The Veterans Administration does it handily. Will it be done in our lifetimes? Unlikely. So the next time you hear someone tell you how much money we're going to save through electronic medical records, you can smile. Wryly. On Apr 23, 2012, at 2:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Hi, Robert, I find the local medical situation terrifying. My daughter had to be admitted to St. V. for an emergency a couple of X-masses ago, and I swear to god there were blood splatters on the wall behind her bed in her room. I am fighting allergies so bad right now they are preventing me from singing in the Chorus I sing for, and all the medical people I talk to are clueless. The feed-back from patients to doctors is non-existent. There's no way a Doctor can tell when he prescribes you medicine whether it has killed you or cured you. Either way, you don't come back. I think folks like you could get rich in the Obama technocrat age AND do a heluva lot of good by designing feedback systems so Doctors actually find out whether they have killed you or not. As for hip surgery. I have been a "candidate" for hip surgery for years but never elected. But arthritic hips are different from osteomyelitic hips. One good thing about medicare is that it doesn't give a rat's ass where you get your medical care. So, I went to Boston for high end carotic surgery a few years ago.. Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard .., the whole nine yards. It didn 't cost me a dime. I had relatives in Boston, so that helped a lot. Good luck with this, Robert. Nick Ooops. I forgot I was exiled. N \ From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Robert Holmes Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 11:53 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Old Folks Only: Medicare & Plan F Move to Europe? -R On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote: Today I had my first experience of a doctor refusing my medicare insurance. This was particularly surprising because I have the Plan F supplement which purports to pay the difference between the Medicare schedule and the doctor's normal fee. I even offered to pay for it all myself and was refused as it's being against the law to pay for treatment while having insurance of any kind! The best they could offer is referring me to a doctor in Los Alamos. (I think if I'm going to have to move my medical services, I'd more likely choose Abq, but I'm not sure if that indeed would be better.) This is spooky! Have any of us had similar experiences? I'm trying to figure out what my alternatives are. - Get off Medicare + supplement plan and pay a great deal for standard blue cross/shield? - Move from standard Medicare to the alternative "Advantage" plans? - Call the doctor every week to see if she's now accepting Medicare? - Suck it up and start looking outside of Santa Fe? - Go find a hip doctor and ask what the best approach is! Please let me/us know what your experiences are in this area! Yikes! -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org "She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience; she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret." Wallace Stegner, "Angle of Repose"
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
