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Wanna cut some med costs 30+% without sacrificing quality? Just have patients rely more on CVS, Walmart, etc. for care. From the Post:
Walk-in medical clinics run by CVS, Wal-Mart and other retailers provide care for routine illnesses that is as good as, and costs less than, similar care offered in doctors’ offices, hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers, according to a new Rand Corp. study. … Physicians groups … have raised concerns about the quality of care in the retail clinics, particularly about whether they over-prescribe medications since many of them are owned by pharmacy chains and whether they do adequate follow-up. But the Rand study found no major differences in these areas between the clinics and the other medical sites surveyed. …
The study was published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine. … Annals also published a related study reporting that one-third of Americans live within a 10-minute drive of such a facility. … The study examined the cases of 2,100 patients … treated for routine illnesses — ear infections, sore throats or urinary tract infections. … The costs of care in retail clinics were 30 to 40 percent lower than in physician offices and urgent care centers and 80 percent lower than in emergency departments” of hospitals. … The study evaluated care based on 14 indicators, including tests given, whether antibiotics were prescribed and whether follow-up treatment occurred. In general, the researchers found that the “scores of retail clinics were equal to or higher than those of other care settings.”
Obama has expressed his extreme eagerness to cut med waste. Think he’ll be eager to publicly adjust his med reform to give Walmart more business?
Walmart Med Is Better
> the next logical step is to allow physicians to have pharmacies
Am I missing snarkasm? I used to work for a multi-doctor practice. We had our own pharmacy; one of my assignments was to figure out if it was profitable.
re: diogenes
A quick glance suggests to me that the study only measures cost, not where the money goes. The three possibilities that jump to my mind are profit, waste, and subsidies to other forms of healthcare. The first one is the most likely to my mind, mainly cost in the form of rent to the artificially limited resource of doctors. Assuming the artificial limitation is fixed, deploying them here is a form of waste.
But I want to stick in a word about the third. My pet peeve about American healthcare is that it is not transparent. A lot of medical billing is inflated in the hope that it will pay for unprofitable sectors, particularly ER. This is a form of price discrimination, one of the largest examples I know. In theory, monopolistic price discrimination and competition both produce efficient outcomes. But I'd feel a lot safer with government interventions (subsidies, for example) in a price system than a monolithic system designed for non-transparency.