- Aug 2021
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www.beckershospitalreview.com www.beckershospitalreview.com
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Unfortunately, some patients receive "surprise doctor bills" when treated at an in-network facility (e.g., hospital) but not all the physicians who practice at that facility participate in their health plan's network. If you need to go to the hospital for a procedure that's not an emergency, ask whether every provider is in your health plan's network.
A hospital might accept a specific insurance plan, but the doctor treating you might not. This means that patients have to do their due diligence in finding out if their physicians are in their net-work. This will avoid 'surprise doctor bills'.
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Keep in mind potential for waste or unnecessary spending. I think patients are starting to pay closer attention to the necessity of care rendered now because as more patients have high-deductible insurance plans, how they spend their money becomes critically relevant to them.
A high-deductiable plan is an insurance which has a lower monthly payment at the cost of higher fees before the insurance covers the cost (deductible).
Dr. Bauer from Hackensack Meridian Health sees more patients having higher-deductible insurance plans. This results in patients scrutinizing costs and tests because they have to pay for those directly.
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- Oct 2020
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Anomie (/ˈænəˌmi/) is a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals".[1] It is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, e.g., under unruly scenarios resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values.
I can't help but see this definition and think it needs to be applied to economics immediately. In particular I can think of a few quick examples of economic anomie which are artificially covering up a free market and causing issues within individual communities.
College Textbooks: Here publishers are marketing to professors who assign particular textbooks and subverting students which are the actual market and consumers of those textbooks. This causes an inflated market and has allowed textbook prices to spiral out of control.
The American Health Care Market In this example, the health care providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) have been segmented away from their consumers (patients) by intermediary insurance companies which are driving the market to their own good rather than a free-er set of smaller (and importantly local) markets that would be composed of just the sellers and the buyers. As a result, the consumer of health care has no ability to put a particular price on what they're receiving (and typically they rarely ever ask, even more so when they have insurance). This type of economic anomie is causing terrific havoc within the area.
(Aside: while the majority of health care markets is very small in size (by distance), I will submit that the advent of medical tourism does a bit to widen potential markets, but this segment of the market is tiny and very privileged in comparison.)
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- Aug 2020
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www.nber.org www.nber.org
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Newhouse, J. P. (2020). An Ounce of Prevention (Working Paper No. 27553; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27553
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www.nber.org www.nber.org
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McLaren, J. (2020). Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Deaths: Seeking Economic Roots with Census data. (Working Paper No. 27407; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27407
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- Jun 2020
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www.thelancet.com www.thelancet.com
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Oncology, T. L. (2020). COVID-19 and the US health insurance conundrum. The Lancet Oncology, 21(6), 733. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(20)30286-2
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