Trump Executive Order Births Sweeping New Rules Allowing Association Health Plans

From our friends at D4PC:

The Trump administration, encouraged by Senator Rand Paul, circumvented Congress with Executive Order 13813 to create rules through the Department of Labor that allow approximately 44 million Americans to create and/or join Association Health Plans (AHP).

These AHP are exempt from many of the ObamaCare mandates that have been cost drivers for the insurance policies offered to self-employed and small businesses that often doubled rates.

“The proposed rule is designed to make it easier for groups of individuals and small businesses to band together and buy the kind of insurance that large companies offer their workers. That kind of insurance is regulated under federal labor law and isn’t subject to all the requirements and consumer protections that apply to individual and small business insurance under ObamaCare.” -NYtimes.com

The sweeping new rules have been published for public comment for 60 days before they are implemented with the force of law.

Click here to read more.

Not news to physicians, but the media is finally seeing through EHR smokescreen

Others’ eyes are finally opening to what physicians have been seeing for years: EHR billing and compliance IT only adds to healthcare costs not quality, economy or patient satisfaction.

In 2016 Forbes reported that “U.S physician costs to keep up [with HIT] have reached more than $32,000 per doctor annually.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2016/08/10/health-it-costs-surpass-32k-per-doctor-annually/amp/

IP4PI founder, Craig M. Wax, D.O., has been writing and speaking on this for the better part of this decade.  Here are just a few of his talks about EHR’s attack on patient care:

EHR privacy and security: mission impossible (patient town hall version 2012)

EHR privacy and security: mission impossible (physician version 2012)

EHR the Trojan horse (2014)

EHR remote control (2014)

This is How You Fix Congress! Congress Reform Act of 2018

We originally posted this solution back in 2013. These changes are needed now more than ever:

1. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

2. No Tenure / No Pension.  A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay or any other benefits when they’ve completed their term in office.

3.  Congress loses their current taxpayer paid health care insurance during and after tenure and must purchase their own health care insurance by the same laws and rules as the American people.

4.  Members of Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

We Need Your Feedback! U.S. Physician Board Certification Survey

Practicing Physicians of America is excited to bring you an important survey to gather information needed to provide data backed, counter arguments to the unsubstantiated claims used by the American Board of Medical Specialties to continue to promulgate their MOC product.

This survey has the potential to be the largest and most authoritative of its kind but not without your help.

Please take 10 minutes of your time to complete this survey and provide us data to defend practicing physicians at a national level against intrusion into our profession. Then share, tag, copy and email this to colleagues. You may use my words and my name. I will fight tooth and nail to be unfettered from those in healthcare that put profits over patients.

We wish you good health, prosperity as we all negotiate the changing environment of 2018!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PPA_MOCSurvey

Marion Mass, M.D. 

Philadelphia area Pediatrician
Practicing Physicians of America, co founder/VP http://practicingphysician.org

Don’t get stuck in ER surrounded by flu victims. Joining a concierge practice is a no brainer.

Dr. Tom LaGrelius writes in:

Joining a concierge practice is a no brainer, unless you want to sit surrounded by coughing masked flu victims in a packed ER unable to treat you with antivirals anyway. The hospitals are using Tamiflu only on patients so sick they are in the ICU. And in most of those cases they need not have bothered. They got their first dose long long long after the effectiveness window had closed. They should save it for the ones ill less than two days when it actually works!

The hospitals are currently swamped with flu victims and have no beds or ER space. 

The Ho$pice Hu$tle?

What’s going on with the recent flurry of acquisitions and divestment in the Hospice industry. IP4P asked HIT-industry veteran Barbara Duck (@MedicalQuack) to weigh in:

“Optum certainly kept this very quiet when they sold their hospice facilities to Compassus; however, they are not out of the business, they want to manage it instead, just as they manage surgeons and physicians with Surgical Care Affiliates and OptumCare doctors.  The worst nightmare for those in hospice has come true, the thought of Optum utilization managers running around Compassus Hospice facilities as they intend now to use Optum Hospice Services to manage them.  Hospice care by the algorithms is what we are looking at here with even more undue and not proven analytical scoring of patients taking place at their last days of their lives.  I think the screen from the PowerPoint presentation on the revenue growth here tells the story of what this company’s (Compassus) goals are, revenue and not patient care being the first priority.