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chemosabe
anonymous snipe artist
(12.45.222.162) on 8/1/2018 - 4:32 p.m. says: ( 25 views
, 6 likes
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"Federal Regulations driving up costs of healthcare"
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I wanted to give an example how the federal government drives up costs:
Just a few years ago, almost every physician's office had a small lab to do blood chemistry tests, blood counts, cholesterol etc. I had one that checked the labs of our patients, running about 200,000 tests a year. Our "profit" on it was always small..about $15,000 a year after paying for reagents, leasing the machines and a phlebotomist to run the machine. The machines are fully automated..the leasing company sends us test samples to calibrate it every morning and they send an engineer out once a week to double check.
The federal government sets the fees for all health services...(my next post). As I have said before..independent physicans' fees are set at 1/3 hospital fees, so our labs were less expensive than hospital labs.
Several years ago, the feds created new regulations that stated that any lab doing anything more than blood counts had to have a permanent lab director AND an onsite lab supervisor. I am the "lab director" (I must take a 40 hour course every other year to learn about how to fill out the paperwork for the various government agencies). But, with profit margins so low, most doctors offices could not afford an onsite lab supervisor ($50,000). So what many doctors did was band together and create "Physician stat labs" where several different physician offices would have partial ownership and share the overhead expenses.
The federal government then passed a reg that the laboratory needed to be ONSITE of the physician's point of service OR all the owners could only refer to a lab in which the ordering physician shared the same tax billing number (all the doctors had to be in the same practice). That reg basically shut down all stand alone physician owned labs, and only large groups, corporations and hospitals could afford to run the labs..the corporations and hospitals charging 3 times as much.
I now only have a CBC machine (I lose money on it). I am not even allowed to use my microscope except for "teaching purposes". All other lab tests now go to my local hospital. (at 3x the cost to the insurance/patient)
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