Via Hot Air:
Two surgeons in Oklahoma City got tired of working within the third-party-payer construct and started posting cash-up-front retail costs for surgeries on their website. The result? Patients responded to the honest approach, and surgeries took place at a significantly lower cost than within the traditional insurance/Medicare model. Why? Because these patients didn’t have to subsidize surgeries for other people — or pay for expensive administrators to deal with the issues arising from the third-party-payer model…
Meanwhile, in nationalized-healthcare-utopia Canada (link from the same Hot Air post):
Surgery wait times for deadly ovarian, cervical and breast cancers in Quebec are three times longer than government benchmarks, leading some desperate patients to shop around for an operating room.
But that’s a waste of time, doctors say, since the problem is spread across Quebec hospitals. And doctors are refusing to accept new patients quickly because they can’t treat them, health advocates say.
A leading Montreal gynecologist said that these days, she cannot look her patients in the eye because the wait times are so shocking. Lack of resources, including nursing staff and budget compressions, are driving a backlog of surgeries while operating rooms stand empty. The latest figures from the provincial government show that over a span of nearly 11 months, 7,780 patients in the Montreal area waited six months or longer for day surgeries, while another 2,957 waited for six months or longer for operations that required hospitalization.
The worst cases are gynecological cancers, experts say, because usually such a cancer has already spread by the time it is detected. Instead of four weeks from diagnosis to surgery, patients are waiting as long as three months to have cancerous growths removed.
I’ll soon be venturing into the Italian healthcare system because there’s something wrong with my right hand (a hard, very painful lump in my palm on the flexor tendon of my ring finger, which I’m pretty is flexor tendon cyst that might need surgery), and I can’t get back to America for a few months. I’ll keep you posted on my exotic journey into nationalized healthcare. We have private insurance but you know what, since this isn’t life-threatening, I’m really thinking I’ll go the public-care route just to see what it’s like. I’m feeling adventurous.