Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Funding Healthcare Reform: Tax Sugar, Not Success, Part II

Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP No one has more eloquently stated the case for carving out the so-called “unnecessaries” from the capitalist code of taxation than Adam Smith. Yet, more than 230 years after the publication of arguably the most authoritative text in defense of capitalism, we continue to struggle with the concept of taxation as a socialist plot. Last month, I examined the so-called “success tax.” I suggested that a tax on earned income …

Funding Healthcare Reform: Tax Sugar, Not Success

Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP Healthcare is the ultimate paradox for democratic and capitalist ideas, an epic clash between inalienable rights and free market forces. Most everyone agrees that basic healthcare should be attainable, affordable, and non-discriminatory for all citizens. But how can we achieve this somewhat socialist-sounding goal within a free market system? Well, the free market has proven incapable of making healthcare affordable, and government coffers have proven too empty to subsidize it. …

Physician Mentoring: Making an Impact

“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill Physician mentoring sounds like an easy enough proposition. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to opine and proselytize, in a position of power, to a new employee who is looking to impress his/her boss? Indeed, you can say most anything you want, with a very low risk of rebuttal or confrontation. Even well-intentioned mentors tend to …

Physician Recruiting: Standing Out in a Crowd

Urgent care is growing by hundreds of centers each year, and available physicians are declining with equal speed. urgent care training is variable, at best, and urgent care experience is hard to find. Expanding health systems with their in-house recruiters and high visibility are tightening the squeeze. All told, it’s a recipe for unfilled positions and staff burnout. Whether you are looking to expand locations, add providers, or replace departing ones, you are bound to …

Healthcare’s Title Bout: Free Market Economics KOs Reform

At the risk of oversimplifying, the healthcare “crisis” – and subsequent attempts to “reform” it – really boils down to a coverage crisis and a cost crisis. The two, of course, are inextricably linked. Ans every attempt to solve one seems to exacerbate the other. Our healthcare delivery system has essentially failed to manage cost and manage coverage simultaneously. The teeter-totter is perpetually imbalanced. The problem with reform efforts to date is complex. However, the …

Minding Your E’s & M’s

Nothing hurts a business more than leaving money on the table. It is hard enough to attract business; the last thing you want to do is not get paid once services are rendered. There are a number of steps in the coding and billing process, and errors at any level can lead to bad debt, missed charges, and poor reimbursement. Let’s look at a few I would call the “low-hanging fruit.” Collection at the Time …

Hospital-owned Urgent Care Networks: Coming Soon to a Community Near You

“The whitecoats are coming, the whitecoats are coming!” if Paul Revere were running an independent urgent care network, this would be his call to arms. After years of denial and arrogance, health systems are finally waking up to the system integration benefits of urgent care. Hospitals stumbled in their response, hampered by bureaucracies, turf wars, and stifling status quo. Well, the fog was finally lifted and urgent care is on the radar. Due, in large …

A Disconnected World

Texting, chatting, networking, blogging, and posting. The evolution of communication into characters on a screen…digitized snippets, factoids, and acronyms used to express display, inform, and explain. Even emotions have been whittled down into emoticons…a semicolon “wink” and a parenthetic “frown.” E-mail? That is soooo last decade! Electronic communication technology has practically replaced more traditional forms. So what does this mean? What is the impact on socialization, relation, and emotional connection? Are there any negative effects? …

Are You Really Listening?

We all think we are great listeners. We “listen” to chief complaints, we listen to histories of present illness, we listen to heart and lung sounds. We spend the better part of the day “listening.” But are we really listening? Or are we just “hearing?” Hearing is the perception of sounds by the auditory nerves in the ear. Listening involves an attentiveness to hear with a purpose of understanding. hearing is a temporal lobe function, …

A Mathematical Model for Political Influence in Healthcare Reform

‘Round and ‘round it goes… and where it stops, nobody knows. Feeling dazed and confused by the dizzying display of legislative slight of hand? Now you see it, now you don’t! Compromise, in theory, sounds like the right thing to do when trying to balance interests. Compromise often leads to parity and equity between competing interests. However, when competing interests have unequal power, compromise tends to favor those with the most influence. I promise a …