Posts tagged 'Treatment'
As people become seniors, especially if they are dealing with various serious ilnesses, worry about end-of-life care. Their families worry about it, too. This is not just dealing with funerals. It is the cost of taking care of an individual and keeping them as healthy as possible as long as possible so that they can have a full life or at least a pain free life as the end nears.
Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:
Dying Hispanics and black Americans have much higher treatment costs than whites, because they get more costly, intensive treatments as they near death, say researchers who analyzed data from the last six months of life of almost 160,000 Medicare patients.
The average cost for Hispanic patients in those final months of life was $31,702, compared with $26,704 for blacks and $20,166 for whites. Compared to white patients, costs were about 30 percent higher for blacks and almost 60 percent more for Hispanics, the Associated Press reported.
The study was published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
The reason: studies show that throughout their lives, minorities are less likely than whites to get aggressive medical care. In addition, minorities have less access to adequate health care througout their lives and especially as they get older - for a myriad of reasons including transportation, lack of local neighborhood doctors, clinics and hospitals, and lack of funds. These findings suggest that medical resources for minority patients are far too often "misallocated over a lifetime," with minority patients receiving more treatment and more extensive and expensive treatment when their illness has become extreme due to lack of care and when there's little chance of improving or extending their lives.
Let us hope that putting partisan politics aside, lawmakers will work with the President and with each other to come up with a plan that helps everyone so that instead of suffering needessly at the end of life and spending enormous amounts of government/taxpayer's money, individuals will have heathcare that will help keep them healthier longer and allow them to die with dignity.
Just when we are talking about going back to the basics of house calls on one end of the spectrum, the other end of the spectrum is beginning a pilot program in telemedicine.
House calls will begin being expanded soon and paid for by Medicare for those with multiple serious conditions and other situations that make house calls the best form of care for them.
Now, with that out of the way, Medicare is still looking for ways to provide effective and adequate treatment to patients while containing costs. They are finally looking at telemedicine.
Telemedicine has been around for quite some time now. Some private insurers have paid for certain treatment by telemedicine. For example, I have a nephew who was born with serious heart problems and had a pacemaker installed when he was younger, nearly a decade ago. Once his initial treatment was completed, telemedicine was used to keep him in sync of his heart surgeon and keep his heart surgeon abreast of his condition.
At the time, what would happen was that we would call a particular phone number and use our phone and another instrument to measure my nephew’s heart rate, heart rhythm, blood pressure and other vitals, as well as whether the pacemaker was working. The doctor would get the reports and then we would have a conference by phone. If there were problems or complications we would go to the local emergency room where my nephew’s doctor would communicate with the emergency room doctor by phone and computer. If things got too serious, we would get my nephew up to the Children’s Hospital where his doctor was on staff.
Today’s telemedicine is more advanced than it was a decade ago. There are cameras and TV screens that allow doctors and patients to see one another. Patients have some of the instruments such as stethoscopes, so that they can be instructed by the doctor when and how to use them so he can help them remotely. There are also touch screens patients can use to answer doctor’s questions to aid in a diagnosis.
Now that insurance companies – and Medicare – have realized what doctors and patients have been saying for years, they are finally trying telemedicine out. Doctors and patients have been telling insurers that it is better for everyone that telemedicine evaluations, where appropriate, cost under $1,500 on average as opposed to a hospital admission or other tests that often add up to somewhere between $2,500 to $15,000.
It is good news that Medicare is now looking at ways to see if telemedicine will work well for certain patients. If it only keeps a few patients out of each hospital, Medicare can save potentially over $100,000 per hospital while patients receive quality care. This is an issue to keep an eye on.
It has become common knowledge that people in different communities in different parts of the country receive better care and access to care, treatment and services than in other areas. That has prompted a study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The study tracked the number of black patients with diabetes that needed amputations vs. the number of white patients who did.
Overall numbers vary throughout the states, however, in the study; blacks needed more amputations than whites did. The study stated that individuals with diabetes need amputations partially because of the care they get and also because the difficulties they have receiving treatment. Other factors are also included, such as whether patients smoke or drink, and particularly, whether they can afford the special diabetic shoes that help with circulation and other factors which could lead to gangrene, thus eventually lead to possible amputation.
Except for Arizona and Kentucky, blacks were less likely to receive annual diabetes blood test than whites. They were also less likely – by quite a lot – to get mammograms, not only because they didn’t’ know about the need, but because they weren’t being told about the importance of the tests and given the prescriptions by doctors to go have them taken. The biggest disparity was in Colorado where 88% of whites were tested, vs. a little over 60% of blacks.
Part of the issue is the need for outreach and availability of Medicare and Medicaid coverage in the poor neighborhoods. Most of the people who are the poorest and live in areas and situations where they are not covered by Medicare are in very compromised health situations by the time they are able to get Medicare or Medicaid coverage.
It is no secret that there are disparities in coverage and treatment throughout the country. The unfortunate point is that people are losing a great deal of quality of life and even losing their lives because of these disparities.
In the wealthiest nation in the world, hopefully there will be a solution to the situation in the near future. Though issues are being looked at, this is a complicated issue, but, complicated or not, the results are overwhelming to the poor and vulnerable among us who deserve quality health care just like anyone else.
