Retail Health Clinic Updates
1. Scott Jagow at Marketplace writes about his recent experience getting "Fast, Cheap, and Happy Health Care" at a Minute Clinic.
2. Ronald Bailey at Reason speculates what real market-based health care reform would look like: A lot of routine care could be handled through retail health clinics located in shopping malls, drug store chains, and megastores. Such centers would be staffed not with physicians but with nurse practitioners or other qualified personnel. Consumers generally would pay for routine, everyday transactions directly out of their health savings accounts.
3. Minute Clinics have become the de facto "nation's pharmacy" by offering H1N1 vaccinations on demand, seven days a week with no appointment necessary at its clinics around the country in 20 states and the District of Columbia.
4 Comments:
If the healthcare bill passes, you will see the growth of more clinics in poorer neighborhoods, and less use of the ER.
Agreed that this is a great way to minimize the use of ER's. Actually there have been urgent care clinics (doc in a box) in many cities for at least 30 years, its just that now they are becoming more accepted. For example they make a lot of sense for the sick kid at 8pm. It also takes a load off the primary care physicians as well, combine this with the move to hospitalists, where the primary care physician does not treat in the hospital, perhaps the primarcy care business will be less stressful, as they don't have to be on duty at all hours.
As this congress turns health care and insurance companies into regulated utilities, innovation will suffer.
Profits, ROI and compensation will be dictated by Washington political hacks.
They've run Amtrak, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security so well, I can't wait until they fix healthcare.
Meanwhile, everyone outside of Nebraska gets to pay the Medicaid bill for people in Nebraska. I'm not sure what happened to "equal treatment under the law", but the Cornhusker Kickback is one of the most egregious examples of political bribery I've ever seen.
The healthcare bill is just a power grab and tax increase masquerading as health care something or other.
Are we sure that these retail health clinics won't be regulated out of existence?
The health insurance lobby has been pretty forceful in trying to prevent them from expanding. Now that health insurance companies and the government are one, doesn't that spell death for these clinics?
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