The First Post: What ’s Wrong with Medicare?

By MATTHEW HOLT So The Health Care Blog  (which I like to think of as the first proper health care blog whatever Jacob Reider says about his Docnotes which started in 1999!) is 15 yrs old this month.  This is the start of our little anniversary celebration. We are going to be running some of the earlier classic posts. The very first post on “What’s wrong with Medicare” still rings true- Matthew Holt For the first post, don’t expect a big essay despite that subject line. It came up because while I was away from the US for the first part of this year, yet another incarnation of NME or HCA — the two original for profit hospital chains of the 1970s that amalgamated into Columbia (now calling itself HCA again!) and Tenet — got caught with its hand in the cookie jar.  You’ll remember NME getting bad press and worse in the 1980s for imposing unwanted inpatient stays on “psychiatric patients”. After that NME morphed into Tenet. Columbia of course said that “health care had never worked like this before” and they were right — to the extent of the upcoding and fraudulent billing going on in its hospitals in the mid 1990s.  I remember one cover of Modern Healthcare in which Tenet’s strategy was encapsulated as “We’re not Columbia”.  Apparently only slogan deep. Last week they settled with the state and feds in California due to massive amounts of upcoding and worse at Redding Medical Center. Several other settlements are pending. The...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs