Recent Stories with tag health care

See, it's like the bus is rising health care costs. And we're all on it.

Here's a local angle on the health care reform debate. This afternoon, I was minding my own business when a chat window popped up. My friend, let's call him Mr. Doe, said, "Wanna hear a funny story?":

I was watching this and eating lunch at my desk --> Obama healthcare speech <--

when I got a call from the "pre-collections" team at [local hospital] because my insurance company took 6 months to decide that they would not cover the expense associated with removing 6 stitches from my son's hand.

There's a visual joke here--watching me try to take notes with my broken hand [snowboard accident]. I'm waiting to get a CAT scan because my insurance will apparently pass on the full price of the procedure to me.

I couldn't even watch the rest of the Obama speech. Let me know how it turns out.

They want to give me 2 CAT scans. One for the hand and another for the wrist. I guess these two body parts are far enough apart as to require separate billable procedures.

"Did we already pass the funny part?" I wrote back....

(more)

Autism is a major research driver in the Northwest--in Seattle we have both the UW's Autism Center and Seattle Children's Autism Center (along with an autism walk and the Lakeside Center for Autism). Seattle Children's Autism Center is a recent creation, resulting from Children's friendly takeover of ASTAR, and offers both clinical study and treatment, making it a one-stop autism shop for families.

Tonight at 8 p.m., KING 5 is airing a Children's Healthlink Special, "The World Within: Northwest Stories of Autism" (also on KONG at 7 p.m. on January 3). Local icon Jean Enersen will be exploring the startling spike in autism rates--it's estimated that one in a hundred children have autism spectrum disorder (ASD)--and why researchers still don't know precisely what is responsible for either ASD or its increase.

What we do know is that when the CDC compared rates of diagnosis in eight-year-olds in 2006 and compared that to 2002, autism's prevalence had increased 57 percent. We also know that early intervention treatment has good results, but that the "early" part is absolutely key. Parents tend to notice something unusual about their children at age two, but in most cases official diagnosis and treatment don't occur until the child is over four years old.

In the House health care bill, $17 would be set aside during the first year for a "National Training Initiative on Autism Spectrum Disorders." This is after NIMH allocated $60 million in "stimulus" funding to promote research on better, earlier means of diagnosis and/or effective treatment for older children and adults with ASD. So autism is literally in all the headlines, though for the short term it seems we're more focused on learning how to live with it than on solid leads for cure or prevention.

"The local angle really does get people's interest," said Michael McCarthy, editor, publisher and et al of the Seattle Local Health Guide. He's a slender, bearded man with a warm manner and it's not all that surprising to learn he's an M.D. himself, trained in internal medicine by Virginia Mason.

His online health guide currently devotes a section to H1N1 flu developments, another to health advice and tips, another to healthcare industry news. It's attracting about 25,000 readers per month--all the flu news has pushed numbers up ever since May, and once people find the site, they come back. The initial site was born in 2007, and reborn a year ago in its Wordpress incarnation.

It may be time, McCarthy admitted a little ruefully, to work harder on the site's revenue stream. Like many people who have founded a news site, he's driven primarily by the sense that it's a public necessity.

Michael McCarthy

McCarthy writes stories himself, and aggregates health industry and policy news from sources like Kaiser Health News and ProPublica. "There are more than enough stories out there," he emphasized. He likes to follow a story's real-time transmission, from a World Health Organization H1N1 conference, to the CDC presser hours later, to a public announcement the next day by Madrona's public schools about their flu policy.

"Part of what's valuable is just finding what's good that's available," he added. Health care news that hasn't caught mainstream interest is out there, but it's chasing too few reporting resources.

His imaginary "reader" is a mom staying educated on health care, but in practice, the site casts a much wider net. McCarthy points out that King County total employment in the health care sector rivals Boeing's. Recently he's begun working with the Seattle Times, which has, thanks to a grant from American University's J-Lab (via the Knight Foundation), started exploring content collaboration with local bloggers....

(more)

"I can't figure out why primary care is dying, and I'd like to resuscitate it," said Dr. Garrison Bliss, summing up his founding of a boutique medical clinic.

We were in a little café on the third floor of the Medical-Dental Building on Olive, below the Qliance offices on 16. Bliss had just taken me on a nickel tour of his clinic, from its peaceful waiting room to its lab, X-ray room ($17 per reading), and even the in-house laundry room, where a load of full-coverage gowns were cycling in warm suds. Now, we were getting coffee. Strike that. I was having coffee. Bliss got fruit juice.

I was down visiting Qliance after reading "How American Health Care Killed My Father" (Atlantic Magazine, September 2009). In it, David Goldhill wrote something startling to me: "The average insured American and the average uninsured American spend very similar amounts of their own money on health care each year--$654 and $583, respectively." He also mentioned, approvingly, that "Qliance Medical Group, for instance, now operates clinics serving some 3,000 patients in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, areas, charging $49 to $79 a month for unlimited primary care."

The Qliance fee scale is graduated for age--I'd be looking at $768 per year for primary care, which, other than an appendectomy back in high school, is all I've ever needed in life to this point. Last year I paid over $3,200 in health insurance premiums on Costco's small business insurance plan. I saw my doctor once, for a physical.

This is the kind of story that makes Bliss's eyes light up. He calls our health insurance dependency "learned helplessness," and likes to reference Marcus Welby when talking about the Qliance difference. "You can design this so that 80 percent of American can pay for primary care out of pocket. And the other twenty percent could do it with some subsidy," he argued. "I'd like to prove that." His first point is that whether you're insured or not, if you want or need quality primary care, you're mostly out of luck....

(more)

In an Atlantic Magazine article--"How American Health Care Killed My Father"--making the rounds right now, a local health care provider gets a mention for its innovative business model and it isn't Group Health:

Qliance Medical Group, for instance, now operates clinics serving some 3,000 patients in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, areas, charging $49 to $79 a month for unlimited primary care, defined expansively.

Last Thursday, September 10, Qliance held its ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new clinic at Kent Station (in Kent, which, for the benefit of our Seattle readers, is here--even farther away than Renton). If nothing else--though there is plenty else--Qliance illustrates the immense costs that the for-profit health insurance model adds to health care. (Qliance's founder Dr. Garrison Bliss claims that about 40 cents of every health care dollar supports the insurance industry.)

For "direct primary care"--same day or next-day appointments for urgent care--clients pay a monthly fee of on average $50-$6...

(more)

Cold and flu season is on its way, and as you know Western medicine has pretty much retreated re: treating it. If the vaccine doesn't work, you are S.O.L. Not like the old days, when they'd give you antibiotic and knock it right out. Now it's "fluids and rest." Health care reform can't come soon enough, in my view.

So what about Eastern Medicine? To Ho's Herbs & Massage Center on Jackson!

I didn't have the flu, but my "girlfriend"--invented for the sake of this exercise--did. I walk in. It looks more like a doctor's office than I expected. Rising from the floor, there's a glass case full of plasti-wrapped boxes of herbal remedies. On the wall behind that case, another case bolted to the wall, this one with dozens of drawers. Further back, to the left of the cases, a middle-aged Chinese man with perfect skin sits surrounded by file folders.

"My girlfriend has the flu," I tell him. "Do you have anything for that?"

"How long ago did it start," he asks, though not in as perfect English as that. I wasn't...

(more)

• T. R. Reid talks at Town Hall at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 8. Tickets are $5 at the door. The Washington Post correspondent and NPR commentator has a new book out, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.

T. R. Reid argues that lack of universal health care is primarily a moral question, not an economic one. It's estimated that each year we do not offer universal health care, 20,000 U.S. citizens die who did not have to. To my ears, the debate sounds Abrahamic:

24What if there are fifty uninsured people in the country? Will You really let them fall ill and not spare the lives of the fifty uninsured people? 25Far be it from You to do such a thing–to kill the uninsured with the terminally ill, treating the uninsured and the terminally ill alike. Far be it from You! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

I can't pretend not to be biased here--I've been a proponent of health care reform since reading of Harry S Truman's attempts at reform in the mid-1940...

(more)