Tag: Colonoscopy

Asinine, Backasswards Colonoscopy Insurance Rules Make Patients Decline Medically Necessary Testing

Jan 27, 2020• 1

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD

I’ve had several telephone calls in the last two weeks from a 40-year-old woman with abdominal pain and changed bowel habits. She obviously needs a colonoscopy, which is what I told her when I saw her.

If she needed an MRI to rule out a brain tumor I think she would accept that there would be co-pays or deductibles, because the seriousness of our concern for her symptoms would make her want the testing.

But because in the inscrutable wisdom of the Obama Affordable Care Act, it was decided that screening colonoscopies done on people with no symptoms whatsoever are a freebie, whereas colonoscopies done when patients have symptoms of colon cancer are subject to severe financial penalties.

So, because there’s so much talk about free screening colonoscopies, patients who have symptoms and need a diagnostic colonoscopy are often frustrated, confused and downright angry that they have to pay out-of-pocket to get what other people get for free when they don’t even represent a high risk for life-threatening disease.

But, a free screening colonoscopy turns into an expensive diagnostic one if it shows you have a polyp and the doctor does a biopsy – that’s how the law was written. If that polyp turns out to be benign, or hyperplastic, there is no increased cancer risk associated with it, but you still have to pay your part of a diagnostic colonoscopy bill because they found something.

How Much Is My Colonoscopy Going to Cost? $600? $5,400?

Aug 27, 2014• 88

By JEANNE PINDER

How much does a colonoscopy cost? Well, that depends.

If you’re uninsured, this is a big question. We’ve learned that cash or self-pay prices can range from $600 to over $5,400, so it pays to ask.

If you’re insured, you may think it doesn’t matter. Routine, preventive screening colonoscopies are to be covered free with no co-insurance or co-payment under the Affordable Care Act.

However, we’re learning that with colonoscopies, as with mammograms, people are being asked to pay sometimes. It’s not clear to us in every case that they should pay, and since we don’t know all the details of these events, we can only offer some general thoughts. We’ve also heard from Medicare enrollees without supplemental Medicare policies that they think they’re responsible for 20 percent of the charged price — so 20 percent of $600 vs. 20 percent of $5,400 is a big deal.

If you’re on a high-deductible plan and the charge to you will be, say, $3,600, you can probably ask around and find a lower rate.

A thorough view of some colonoscopy billing issues is in this article in The New York Times by Libby Rosenthal, who has been covering health costs for the paper. We’ve heard also about in-network providers using out-of-network anesthesiologists, so it pays to pay attention.

Things That Make Me Worry About My Colonoscopy

Apr 17, 2014• 17

By Mark Graban

Sorry to get all Katie Couric on you, but I’m going to have a colonoscopy on Friday. I turned 40 last October and I have some family history that leads my doctor to get one done now rather than at 50.

Unlike Katie, I won’t be broadcasting mine live, but I’ll share some articles and reflections on the process and, being process focused, what could go wrong. It’s a very necessary procedure, but there are, sadly, some very unnecessary and preventable risks.

According to Dr. Wikipedia (backed by journals):

This procedure has a low (0.35%) risk of serious complications

That’s about 1 in 300 patients, put another way.

For those of you who speak Six Sigma, that’s a 99.65% first time yield and a 4.2 sigma level.

That’s not going to scare me away.

Maybe I should have asked what my physician’s complication rates are. What are the complication rates at the surgical center where this will be done? Is this safer than being at a full-blown hospital or doesn’t it matter? Should I be more of an “engaged patient?”

Should I have asked more questions of my primary care provider? Why did she refer me to this GI specialist? Is he a “Best” doctor? Does that matter?

If I treat them as a supplier (respectfully), should I be able to walk the process and see what they do to prevent, say, instrument or scope disinfection errors?

Should I have asked:

Show me how you disinfect the equipment
Show me your training records for the people doing this work
Show me your equipment maintenance records
How do you verify that the work is being done properly?
Have you had any complaints or incidents in the past?

I had my pre-procedure phone call on Monday. Maybe I should follow up and ask a few of these questions, even if I can’t go “walk the gemba” to check things out myself. What would you do?

Of course, I didn’t have data or information available to me to know:

Which specialist is best at this?
Who has the highest or lowest complication rates?
What are the prices for different doctors or locations?

I don’t know how a busy person makes an informed decision.

Bending the Cost Curve with Reference Pricing

Jun 27, 2013• 12

By Mike Miesen

Mitt Romney’s/Paul Ryan’s premium support/voucher plan was heavily derided during the dark days of Campaign 2012, but the devil was always more in the details than the theory. While the re-election of President Obama left premium support dead on the Medicare level, health insurers are increasingly turning to the ideas that drove it – choice, competition, and the power of a (carefully regulated) market – to address high costs on the procedural level. Call it the micro-voucherization of health insurance.

This is known by wonks as reference pricing, and its recent results in California are promising: the costs of hip and knee replacements fell by 19%, with no attendant decrease in quality. Using reference pricing is an assault on the status quo that holds the promise of “bending the curve” in a meaningful way, but it faces technical and political concerns that may consign it to the graveyard of promising-but-unfulfilled ideas.

Broadly-speaking, reference pricing is the act of offering a set amount of money for the purchase of a good, where the reference is an amount that can reasonably said to offer meaningful coverage for that good. Sometimes, reference pricing is focused on a given procedure – what I’ll refer to as “inputs-oriented reference pricing”; other times, a given outcome, or “outputs-based reference pricing.”

That’s pretty vague, so let’s use the colonoscopy procedure (which has recently received a lot of attention thanks to an informative New York Times article) to help color this in. The inputs-oriented approach would see the payer asking: given the choice to have a colonoscopy – a procedure which varies wildly in cost without varying wildly in quality – what’s a reasonable price to pay? It would decide this based on some combination of price, quality, and geography, and would inform consumers of its spending cap.

Say it finds that most of its insured population can reasonably access a high-quality colonoscopy for $10,000; if a consumer choose provider that charges $15,000, he or she would pay the $5,000 difference out of pocket. Choice is preserved, but at a cost. The simple chart above shows how this may work.

But, if you read the colonoscopy article, you may be asking a separate question: why pay for a colonoscopy at all?

An Anesthesiologist Thinks Out Loud

Jun 5, 2013• 14

By Shirie Leng, MD

Anyone who has read my work knows that articles like the one written in the New York Times on Sunday by Elisabeth Rosenthal will immediately get a response out of me. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link.

Where do I start with this??? I’m going to let Ms. Rosenthal tell you about how many unnecessary colonoscopies we do. I’ll let her tell you how much more it costs here than anywhere else. I will address the anesthesia bit. Let me tell you a little story. When I was a baby anesthesiologist my hospital sent anesthesiologists “downstairs” to do anesthesia for GI procedures maybe once a week for a few hours.

This was in 2004 or so. Now we send three board certified anesthesiologists to various GI units every day all day. We do maybe 25 cases a day on average. Now, some of this is due to the aggressive expansion of the advanced GI procedures unit as well as the addition of an outside private group that was recently folded into the greater hospital system. It’s also because we’re there. It’s no accident that as soon as we committed troops to the GI battle all of a sudden everybody needed anesthesia.

The NYT article uses Dierdre Yapalater as an example, a healthy 60-something. Putting aside the ridiculous cost for the overall procedure, she was billed $2,400 for anesthesia. But she didn’t need anesthesia. There is absolutely no reason for her to have an anesthesiologist involved for that case. None.

Anesthesia care used to be limited to very sick patients, not because they are harder to sedate (they’re actually often easier) but to monitor them closely because of their tenuous physiologic status. Now everybody is getting it. Why did she get anesthesia, why did the anesthesiologist give it, why does insurance pay for it?

The (Great) Colonoscopy Experience

Aug 1, 2012• 17

By John Halamka, MD

Today, as Kathy finished her last radiation therapy appointment, I had my first screening colonoscopy – a rite of passage for new 50 year olds.

Although a bit of a personal issue, I’m known for my transparency and I’m happy to share the experience so that others approaching 50 know what to expect.

The preparation is the hardest part. Three days before the procedure, it’s recommended that you reduce the quantity of high fiber foods you eat – fruits, vegetables, nuts etc. For me that was particularly challenging since my entire diet as a vegan (who tends to avoid white flour, white rice, and white sugar) is high fiber. I moved to soups and brown rice. A day before the procedure (really 36 hours), you move to a clear liquid diet – apple juice, broth, and tea. In my case I drank a cup of vegetable broth and apple juice every 3 hours.

At 7pm the night before the procedure, the real challenge begins. The bottle of magnesium citrate reads “a pasteurized, sparkling, laxative”. Sounds so appealing. The first dose is 15 ounces. The bottle warns that the maximum therapeutic dose is 10 ounces in 24 hours for adults, but colonoscopy is a special case. The 15 ounces of laxative is followed by 24 ounces of clear liquids over the next 2 hours. Keep in mind that you have not eaten any solid food for 24 hours at this point. Sparkling laxative followed by broth and apple juice is not Chez Panisse.

Save Money on Medical Costs – Get Your Old Medical Records

Apr 1, 2011• 23

By DAVIS LIU, MD

There are many tips to saving money on medical costs like asking your doctor only for generic medications, choosing an insurance plan with a high deductible and lower monthly premiums, going to an urgent care or retail clinic rather than the emergency room, and getting prescriptions mailed rather than go to a pharmacy.

How about getting your old medical records and having them reviewed by a primary care doctor? It might save you from having an unnecessary test or procedure performed.

Research shows that there is tremendous variability in what doctors do. Shannon Brownlee’s excellent book, Overtreated – Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, provides great background on this as well as work done by the Dr. Jack Wennberg and colleagues on the Dartmouth Atlas. Some have argued that because of the fee for service structure, the more doctors do the more they get paid. This drives health care costs upwards significantly. Dr. Atul Gawande noted this phenomenon when comparing two cities in Texas, El Paso and McAllen in the June 2009 New Yorker piece.

Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.

Doctors apparently seemed to order more tests. Patients, not surprisingly, agreed. After all, without adequate medical knowledge or experience, how sure would you be if a doctor recommended a test and you declined?Continue reading…