I’ve worked in a VA hospital that was 80% empty before. It wasn’t 80% empty because of a lack of patients. It was 80% empty because of a lack of staff.
Administrative bef closures are the most frustrating thing in medicine. “There’s the bed, here’s the equipment, but you are telling me i cannot help this kid?” Yeah, i hate that too.
Monstrous.
… To reduce residents’ hospital visits, UnitedHealth has offered nursing homes an array of financial sweeteners that sounded more like they came from stockbrokers than medical professionals.
Over the past seven years, the company has shelled out “Premium Dividend” and “Shared Savings” payments that boosted nursing homes’ bottom lines. Through its “Quality and Shared Risk” program, UnitedHealth offered an even bigger cut to nursing homes that drove down medical spending, but threatened to claw back money from those that didn’t, according to former employees and internal corporate documents.
One term that UnitedHealth executives obsessed over was “admits per thousand” – APK for short. It was a measure of the rate that nursing homes sent their residents to the hospital. Under the “Premium Dividend” program, a low APK qualified a nursing home for the various bonus payments the insurer offered. A high APK meant that a nursing home received nothing.
“APK drove everything,” said one former national UnitedHealth executive who worked on the initiative with nursing homes in more than two dozen states and spoke about the confidential contracts on the condition of anonymity. “You gain profitability by denying care, and when profitability suffers for the shareholders, that’s when people get crazy and do things that are not appropriate.” …
APK or “Let them die there” incentives.
All this comes as Kennedy has said he plans to direct federal researchers to stop publishing their work in independent, peer-reviewed journals and instead called on the National Institutes of Health to develop its own research journals.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kenned said on the “Ultimate Human” podcast earlier this week.
Well, that’s one way to fix it. Only publish in what amounts to self-published, unreviewed “journals.” In any reasonable situation, this revelation would be absolutely damning and discrediting. Here, it gets brushed off and move on like it’s all good. This is not the way I was trained not how I practice.
Anyone seen my jaw? It dropped on the floor somewhere.
You’re consuming too much seed oil. &/or fluoride.
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It’s that damn job painting radium dials on watches.
Can the non-investors sue the investors for being unethical sociopaths?
Well, I think that the insured individuals ought to sue the investors. Whatever money the investors makes from the lawsuits should go right back to the insured.