News In Healthcare

A report in the Port­land Busi­ness Jour­nal explains how the increased usage of e-mail by patients may actu­ally have a pos­i­tive impact on the health­care indus­try.  It seems that the more e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tion between  a patient and his/her physi­cian, the less office vis­its incurred.   This has a pos­i­tive impact on the health insur­ance indus­try.  Less office vis­its means less claims paid.   How­ever, not every­one is jump­ing to the com­puter to com­mu­ni­cate on-line.  With the decrease in office vis­its comes less rev­enue for physi­cians.  So it seems that e-mail will put more money in the pock­ets (the very deep pock­ets) of the insur­ance com­pa­nies, and less money in the pock­ets of the physi­cians.  The one aspect miss­ing from the arti­cle is the finan­cial impact felt by the patients.

Last week Pres­i­dent Bush announced that he is propos­ing a $15,000 per fam­ily tax cut for fam­i­lies with health insur­ance cov­er­age.  The move goes along with his theme of fix­ing the health­care cri­sis at the indi­vid­ual level as opposed to the gov­ern­ment level.  The tax cuts, along with the health sav­ings accounts he is so proud of, will allow fam­i­lies to pay for their own health­care expenses.  Or so he says.