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Medicare To Require Hospitals To Post Prices Online (pbs.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: Medicare will require hospitals to post their standard prices online and make electronic medical records more readily available to patients, officials said Tuesday. The program is also starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for costly new forms of immunotherapy to battle cancer. Hospitals are required to disclose prices publicly, but the latest change would put that information online in machine-readable format that can be easily processed by computers. It may still prove to be confusing to consumers, since standard rates are like list prices and don't reflect what insurers and government programs pay.
Likewise, many health care providers already make computerized records available to patients, but starting in 2021 Medicare would base part of a hospital's payments on how good a job they do. Using electronic medical records remains a cumbersome task, and the Trump administration has invited technology companies to design secure apps that would let patients access their records from all their providers instead of having to go to different portals. Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also announced Medicare is starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for a costly new form of immunotherapy called CAR-T. It's an expensive gene therapy that turbocharges a patient's own immune system cells to attack cancer. The cost for such a procedure can exceed $370,000 per patient.
Likewise, many health care providers already make computerized records available to patients, but starting in 2021 Medicare would base part of a hospital's payments on how good a job they do. Using electronic medical records remains a cumbersome task, and the Trump administration has invited technology companies to design secure apps that would let patients access their records from all their providers instead of having to go to different portals. Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also announced Medicare is starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for a costly new form of immunotherapy called CAR-T. It's an expensive gene therapy that turbocharges a patient's own immune system cells to attack cancer. The cost for such a procedure can exceed $370,000 per patient.
I wouldn't say dammit. This isn't doing anything to fix the fucked up pricing practices of the USA medical system. Most people don't pay what the hospital quotes on their *first* bill.
Hey, nice spin.
They are preventing a small child (not toddler, he can't toddle, having never been conscious in his life), in a vegetative state, from being kept permanently in that vegetative state, after two years of legal wranglings with the parents, where NO OTHER REPUTABLE DOCTOR in the world has been able to suggest anything but palliative care (one tried, was thrown out of court for being an absolute quack - heard much of him recently?), and who has been on life-support his entire life, FOR FREE, WITHOUT CHARGE, EVER. Taken to court, the Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Supreme Court, and ALL said "Nope, he has no chance of a life, we need to end his life-support" despite multiple appeals.
Being held in a hospital ON LIFE SUPPORT that fucking morons are trying to storm to "free" the child, against the parent's wishes and legal orders, disturbing other patients (including children and parents in worse situations), harassing and threatening medical staff (who are nothing to do with it) and generally running up the fucking costs to the taxpayer.
P.S. Learn your fucking country's procedures. NOT ONE GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE has any say whatsoever in if the child is treated or not (without life-long, free and constant permanent treatment the child dies, with it he merely never gains consciousness, and there's not a reputable doctor in the world that disagrees). The courts have decided. Many of them. Several times. More times than even people who seek legal euthanasia in another country require.
So... BOLLOCKS to your spin. Because it's utter shite and keeping a boy who could be in constant pain and suffering alive to keep his parents happy, at ENORMOUS medical, policing and legal cost... FOR FREE. He's vegetative. Brain-dead. Never seen the light of day. A brain destroyed from birth by a neurological condition that's entirely untreatable and will only worsen. And an army of doctors kept him alive by default without question for two years while the legal wranglings go on, and they may be ordered by a court of law to "cease treatment" (i.e allow him to die naturally, rather than sustain him artificially for his entire life).
It's almost like it has nothing to do with expense, but what's right for the boy, isn't it?
P.S. Look up the Bambino Jesu hospital the parents want to send him to. It's a fucking Vatican-funded profit center, scam-host and shithole.
Before you comment on that as a statement against the NHS, go work in one of their hospitals and see the doctors and nurses crying and fighting all day to save the child, and then being threatened, attacked and harassed in their own homes for doing so (My girlfriend worked in Great Ormond Street... same thing, about six months ago, similar case, the people "protesting" were fucking cunts just out to spoil for a fight, and even the parents were pleading them to go away. I think the child's name in that instance was Charlie Gard or similar?).