health care – Crasstalk

Seeing Healthcare from the Other Side

Recently, I had the eye-opening experience of being in pain and entering the emergency room as a patient. I didn’t inform the triage nurse, nor my assigned nurse that I was a fellow RN, as I have found that there can be a negative reaction. Sometimes, they can feel threatened and that you are judging how well they are doing their job. Other times, they can view you as being a pushy know-it-all. Knowing that these reactions exist, I have taken the approach of pretending that I’m your average patient. Continue reading →

Washington State Limits Emergency Room Visits For Medicaid Recipients

Emergency Department (ED) costs are a significant source of our country’s skyrocketing healthcare costs. The ED is often treated as a clinic by uninsured and insured alike, who either do not want to or cannot visit a primary care provider or who do not have one. ED care is expensive and is not at all set up to treat chronic conditions or provide routine care. It is a less than ideal environment for routine care or care for non urgent issues that could wait until office hours at a primary care provider. There are long waits and all the infectious disease risk of hospitals. There is also little or no mechanism for following up with patients to insure compliance with treatment or to gauge effectiveness of treatment. Continue reading →

The U.S. Economy, As Told By Graphs

I was never much of a math student, but if you put something into a nifty graph for me, I can usually get the gist. Here’s a collection of great economics graphs that, taken together, paint a picture of what’s going on with the U.S. economy. Continue reading →

What’s Up, Doc? How to Choose a Personal Physician

Well, he or she should be hawt, like clueless wolf cub Dr. Karev from Grey’s Anatomy or Dr. Robin Scorpio from General Hospital. Kidding! I kid! By ‘hawt”, I mean that he or she should take your health plan as payment, and accomodate the preposterous rules about using Flexible Spending Accounts for co-payments. If you have neither insurance nor an FSA, the general principles below apply anyhow. Continue reading →

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