Getting Sick and Going Broke – CVS, Credit Cards, and Crippling Medical Debt
BY MIKE MAGEE
The Medical-Industrial Complex is swarming with grifters. This is to be expected when you build a purposefully complex system designed to advance profitability for small and large players alike. The $4T operation payrolling 1 in 5 American workers is, in large part, a hidden economy, one built by professional tricksters, designed by Fortune 100 firms with mountains of lobbyists, but reinforced as well by friendly doctors and hospitals engaged in petty and small scale swindling who justify their predatory actions as entrepreneurial, innovative, and purposeful means of necessary financial survival.
Wh...
Source: The Health Care Blog - June 27, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy CVS Medical Industrial Complex PBMs Source Type: blogs
Health IT: Buy or Sell – Healthcare IT Today Podcast Episode 91
For the 91st episode of the Healthcare IT Podcast, we’re doing another edition of our popular Health IT: Buy or Sell. In this episode, we look at four grand statements about something in healthcare IT. Then, Colin and I share whether we’re buying this as something that will happen or whether we’re selling it because we don’t think it’s going to happen. In this edition we have some juicy topics including: the recession, prior auth, Judy’s retirement, and cyberattacks.
Here’s a preview of the questions and topics we discuss in this episode:
Health IT will be affected less by a...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - June 27, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: John Lynn John Lynn and Colin Hung Tags: Ambulatory C-Suite Leadership EMR-EHR Healthcare IT Healthcare IT Today Podcasts Hospital - Health System Security and Privacy Health IT Health IT Companies Health IT Podcasts Healthcare Cyberattacks Healthcare Cybersecurity Health Source Type: blogs
Getting Sick and Going Broke – CVS, Credit Cards, and Crippling Medical Debt
BY MIKE MAGEE
The Medical-Industrial Complex is swarming with grifters. This is to be expected when you build a purposefully complex system designed to advance profitability for small and large players alike. The $4T operation payrolling 1 in 5 American workers is, in large part, a hidden economy, one built by professional tricksters, designed by Fortune 100 firms with mountains of lobbyists, but reinforced as well by friendly doctors and hospitals engaged in petty and small scale swindling who justify their predatory actions as entrepreneurial, innovative, and purposeful means of necessary financial survival.
Wh...
Source: The Health Care Blog - June 24, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Uncategorized Credit cards CVS Medical Industrial Complex Source Type: blogs
How a Pandemic Plus Recession Foretell the Post-Job-Based Horizon of Health Insurance
Allison K. Hoffman (University of Pennsylvania), How a Pandemic Plus Recession Foretell the Post-Job-Based Horizon of Health Insurance, 71 DePaul L. Rev. (2022): For many years, the health insurance that people received through their jobs was considered the gold standard,... (Source: HealthLawProf Blog)
Source: HealthLawProf Blog - June 23, 2022 Category: Medical Law Authors: Katharine Van Tassel Source Type: blogs
The Menace of Fiscal Inflation
ConclusionTo say that“inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” is not to say that fiscal policy doesn ’t matter. “Fiscal inflation” is indeed “a menace,” as Cochrane and others have argued. Few experts predicted the shift from low inflation before the pandemic to nearly 9 percent CPI inflation today. Policymakers largely ignored the implications of the post-2008 operating system, the close dance between cumulative federal deficits and M2 growth, and the risk of adhering to the Fed’s “lower for longer” recipe for its policy rate in the hope of stimulating asset markets and the economy wi...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 16, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: James A. Dorn Source Type: blogs
A Brief History of Hard and Soft Landings
Alan ReynoldsThis year marks the thirteenth time since 1954 that the Federal Reserve Board ’s policy‐making Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began gradually ratcheting up the federal funds rate on bank reserves in a series of recurring steps. Eventually, however, the rate increases always stopped and the FOMC began bringing the “fed funds rate” back down.The inevitable series of interest rate reductions most often did not begin until recession had already begun, or too shortly before, so those monetary policy experiments are now looked back on as “hard landings.”Whenever the rate increases stopped in ti...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 14, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
Escalating Oil Prices and Fed Funds Rates Preceded Every Recession Since 1957
Alan ReynoldsIn 1997, Former Federal Reserve ChairmanBen Bernanke, while still an academic, wrote a famous historical study for the Brookings Institution: “Systematic Monetary Policy and the Effects of Oil Price Shocks” with Mark Gertler and Mark Watson.It began by documenting that “essentially all the U.S. recessions of the past thirty years have been preceded by both oil price increases and a tightening of monetary policy. ” So here we are again tightening monetary policy at a time of unaffordable oil price increases.In fact, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell argues the Fed must be more aggressive about r...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 10, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
The Macro View – Health, Economics, and Politics and the Big Picture. What I Am Watching Here And Abroad.
June 09, 2022 Edition-----The Russian war on Ukraine is now well over 100 days old. The destruction and deaths are just awful and the world is being seriously re-shaped. Where this ends is unknowable but unlikely to be good.In the US we are seeing almost daily mass shootings and no-one seems to know what to do. Just pathetic.In the UK the hangover is slowly lifting after the 4 day royal celebration.In OZ we are having an energy crisis which we hope we will find solutions for soon!-----Major Issues.------https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/australias-labor-government-faces-a-whole-new-economic-ball-game/news...
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - June 9, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David G More MB PhD Source Type: blogs
The New Deal and Recovery, Part 18: The Recovery So Far
George Selgin(Although my contributions to this series have so far been more-or-less in their proper order, this one isn ' t: it occurred to me only relatively recently that it would be worthwhile to take stock of the overall progress of the recovery up to the outbreak of the Roosevelt Recession before delving into that episode. Had I done this in the first place, this installment would be Part 10 of the series, with the present Part 10 and all subsequent installments moved up a notch. –Ed.)When it struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act in January 1936, the Supreme Court dropped the final curtain on the original New...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: George Selgin Source Type: blogs
The Fed Minutes Add New Humility and Flexibility
Alan ReynoldsTheMay 3 –4 Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee earned a welcome relief rally from stock and bond investors, which includes nearly everyone with an IRA or 401(k) retirement account. Why? In my judgement it was because FOMC participants sounded more pragmatic and humbler about predicting and managing the unknowable future. Specifically, the FOMC no longer seemed so rigidly committed to a fixed schedule of routine half ‐point or larger increases in the federal funds rate from June through December. In place of the mid‐March introduction of annual central planning, the Minutes now s...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 27, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
Is a Recession Coming? A Key Indicator Is Also the King of Mixed Messages
When fears of inflation arise in the United States, people start paying a lot of attention to weekly unemployment-insurance claims, as an early indicator of layoffs that could augur a broader slump. But unemployment claims are a flawed gauge that may be particularly skewed by the pandemic. (Source: The RAND Blog)
Source: The RAND Blog - May 27, 2022 Category: Health Management Authors: Kathryn A. Edwards Source Type: blogs
CBO Budget Outlook
Chris EdwardsThe Congressional Budget Office has released new projections for the federal budget. Much has changed since CBO ’s last outlook in July 2021, including soaring inflation, the war in Ukraine, and new spending passed by Congress. The new outlook shows higher debt and deficits over the coming decade, and it underscores the need for policymakers to sharply change budget direction.Debt held by the public is expected to rise from 98 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year to 110 percent by 2032, which would be the highest in U.S. history. The deficit will dip to $984 billion in 2023, and then start risin...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 25, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
The Fed ’s Unplanned Soft Landing of 2018–19
Alan ReynoldsFederal Reserve officials spentmonths talking ‐up their visions of a linear upward path for the overnight federal funds rate on bank reserves, but with few clues about when the increase might stop or why.But markets do not wait for the Fed to act. The policy ‐making Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) had done nothing until now except to raise the fed funds rate a quarter point in March. Yet they nonetheless managed to double mortgage interest rates and crash the value of bonds and stocks in retirement accounts by simply talking increasingly bold ly about what FOMC members “project” might happ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 4, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve Was Never Used Strategically
Alan ReynoldsPresident Biden plans to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) for a million barrels a day for six months, describing this as “awartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year. ”This is only the second time that the SPR has been used for the purpose Congress intended in 1975 – to counteract temporary spikes in the global price of oil due to cartel extortion or foreign wars. The first time was during the Gulf War, on January 16, 1991, when President George H.W. Bush announced the SPR would immediately begin selling up to 2.5 million barrels a day. On the following d...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
Warburton on Theories of Monetary Control and the Fed
James A. DornIn December 1946, Clark Warburton published an article in thePolitical Science Quarterly titled,“Monetary Control under the Federal Reserve Act,”which was reprinted in chapter 14 of his landmark book,Depression, Inflation, and Monetary Policy (1966). He argues that the Federal Reserve ’s failure to prevent the Great Depression was “a result, in part, of the inadequacy of the monetary theory underlying the [Federal Reserve] Act and, in part, of the failure to carry out in practice the theory which was embodied in the Act” (Warburton, 1966: 301; all page numbers refer to his book). In particular, if th...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 24, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: James A. Dorn Source Type: blogs
