Word: patients
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...line. Highway officials reported that driving was down 15% on freeways and as much as 25% on city streets. Shopping fell off (down 15% in Beverly Hills); so too did visits to dentists and doctors, though while one physician waited in a San Francisco gas line, he examined a patient in his car, diagnosed a minor ailment and wrote out a prescription...
...piece of equipment." If the Government and private insurers provided an incentive to hold down costs, the "rats" could force a much greater sharing of facilities. Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital, for example, provides computerized electrocardiogram analysis for seven other hospitals in Michigan. When a heart patient checks into Crystal Falls Community Hospital in the Upper Peninsula, a physician attaches wires to the patient's arms, legs and chest, then pushes a button that activates a line to the Ford Hospital computer. As soon as a circuit is clear, the Detroit computer signals "go," then reads the electrical signals...
...Medicine is inherently a sellers' market. The customer (patient) has no bargaining power; he initiates only one decision?to see a doctor. The sellers (doctors and hospitals) then take over; they decide what services the patient needs, and do not ask but order him to buy. Unable to diagnose his own illness, the patient has little choice but meekly to obey...
...workers, private insurers have picked up a giant chunk of hospital-doctor bills. In 1965 Congress chipped in, providing Medicare payments for those over 65 and Medicaid assistance for the poor. There are still gaps in the coverage: the 20% or so of the bill that the typical Medicare patient must pay can be a severe burden; the long illness that exhausts inadequate insurance benefits is a terror to the middle class. Nonetheless, the system of "third-party payments" has become so comprehensive that patients today pay directly a mere 6% of hospital bills and 39% of all physicians' fees...
...Some insurance practices operate directly to drive up costs. Many insurance companies will pay for lab tests only if they are done in a hospital on a supposedly sick patient. The result is to encourage hospitalization of untold thousands of people who could be diagnosed and/or treated at far less cost in a doctor's office. Says one Houston physician: "Say a man in his late 30s to early 40s complains of chest pains. I tell him he needs a thorough physical. In the office my fee would be $45, the tests $250, for a total...