Election week in America – the never-ending show continues…
Here’s what else happened this week.
Online registration for the CompLaude awards opened up; you can sign up here for the December 3 virtual event. Congratulations to all the nominees.
The fine folk at WCRI continue to pump out relevant research; I have a lot of catching up to do but did manage to dive into their analysis of New York’s work comp systems and the results thereof. Quick takeaways:
- Medical inflation has been pretty flat since 2014, driven by decreasing costs for non-hospital providers. You read that right; costs dropped by about 1 percent per year from 2014 – 2019.
- Hospital outpatient payments per claim went up 2 percent per year over that period
- Drug costs in the Empire State have dropped by 9 – 12 percent per year, driven by
- a 48% drop in morphine equivalents per claim, and a 23 point decrease in the percentage of claims with an opioid script.
Way to go New York.
Addiction treatment
A great piece in WaPo about contingency management, a treatment approach that is yielding promising results. Essentially it rewards drug users with money and prizes for staying abstinent. Some folks don’t like it on moral grounds; they feel its wrong to reward addicts for staying clean.
I’m no ethicist, but this strikes me as a reasonable objection. However, it has to be balanced against the good that comes from helping people recover. Critics’ high morals kind of pale in comparison to keeping people alive.
For now, only the VA is paying for this. It’s long past time private insurers and Medicare/Medicaid stepped up.
All things COVID
I haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to the eruption of COVID; will do a couple posts next week to catch up. In the meantime, here’s treatment news.
From MedScape, good news; it appears the risk of cardiovascular problems in young athletes recovering from COVID isn’t as high as once thought.
Okay, that’s the good news. The not-good news is the most common version of the virus has mutated and is now more contagious. However, we appear to have dodged a bullet – this version of the virus also mutates much more slowly than other common viruses. It’s really hard to attack a virus that’s constantly changing as scientists are constantly playing catch up. A relatively stable virus means the development of vaccines and treatments should be a lot more productive.
Lastly, there’s been a lot of misinformation that doctors and hospitals are over-counting COVID cases because they make more money. In a word, that’s a lie. Hospitals do not receive extra funds when patients die from COVID-19.
Miscoding patients and deaths would be fraud and could result in criminal prosecution.
For the relatively small percentage of patients that don’t have health insurance, there is Federal money available, HOWEVER, healthcare providers can only submit claims that list covid-19 as a patient’s primary diagnosis. Patients with COVID often die of sepsis and other conditions; in those cases providers get paid nothing.
Net – there is zero evidence to support that assertion. None whatsoever.
I find this incredibly offensive; one of our daughters is a nurse working in a major hospital and her husband is a clinician at a VA facility. 1700 healthcare workers have died of COVID – 200 of them are nurses.
These lies are reprehensible.
