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Robert

Tearing Down Healthcare. Maybe That’s What They Should Do

Got a chance this week to spend some time with a wonderful person, Susan Wentz, MD MS, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She’s a very insightful person when it comes to many things, especially healthcare. I mention her because she gets credit for this initial analogy. I just took it a bit [...]

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The Myth of the $4 Prescription and a Bit of Shakespeare

By way of explanation, the $4 prescription is a misnomer. Some are $4. But for the most part, what the pharmacy is doing is simply reducing your co-pay to $4. They still charge your insurance for the part above your co-pay, be it Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance. You’re still paying for the balance of the [...]

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Your Insurance Saved You $84.99

That’s the line that stared back at me from the printout on the prescription the bag came in.
Your insurance saved you $84.99.
Did my insurance truly “save me $84.99″ I wondered.
Like most of us with private insurance, I don’t get EOBs for my prescriptions. I simply pay a prescription co-pay of $10 for generics and $35 [...]

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German Healthcare

I spent a lot of time in Germany – 2 years to be exact – and found Unity’s post about Health 2.0 taking off in Germany very interesting http://wisdom.blogs.com/health/2007/11/health-20-takin.html (see the original post at http://gigaom.com/2007/11/17/health-20-gaining-traction-in-germany/). Both systems have something to learn from one another, and here are some tidbits.
I got to experience the German healthcare system [...]

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Health 2.0 and Finding Common Interests

Had the pleasure of being at the recent Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco hosted by Matthew Holt with a big assist from Indu Subaiya, John Pluenneke and Sara Sara Walker. GREAT JOB! They really pulled off an incredible conference. My only complaint is that we needed at least one more day – oh, and [...]

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Health 2.0 and…and…and…

As Christopher mentioned, we’ve closed our Series A round this past week.
Never ones to slow down, we’re in San Francisco this week for the upcoming Health 2.0 conference hosted by Matthew Holt. But before we could leave, we had to squeeze in a meeting Monday AM before our flight with some new friends – a [...]

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They Bill Us, and We Pay Them

OK call me naive. I thought my healthcare provider was working for me. In all fairness, it usually does, but this past incident reminds me that they do not always.
I recently had a provider’s office call me back for a follow up – some photos. Pretty simple really – they had already done it once. [...]

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THIS IS NOT A BILL

We’ve all seen it – the EOB (Explanation of Benefit) with the bold lettering that proudly declares THIS IS NOT A BILL. So what is it? We called around to some insurers to find out about it and to see if they had a guide for the high math that they so often employ.
“It’s pretty easy.”
That’s [...]

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Medical Bills are Like Snowflakes

Medical bills are like snowflakes in two very important ways:

No two are exactly alike.
They fall from the sky in flurries or in blizzards.

OK, some medical bills are alike, but it made a good analogy. Still comparing medical bills is a delicate task. Take an earlier post where I had two separate Level 1 ER visits [...]

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Children’s ER Visit

My three year old is a born entertainer. She has curly red hair, a personality that just grabs people and she’s a born talker. One morning on vacation recently, she and I were up before the rest of the family. I told her to be quiet so we didn’t wake anyone up. I fixed coffee, [...]

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