WaPo: The health care industry is letting surgeons behave like muggers

And we patients are expected to negotiate with them? Read on.

It’s not only surgeons, of course, but this Washington Post story lays out the problem pretty clearly. Surprise billing can happen whenever a cross-covering physician is out-of-network. A colleague checked before scheduling spine surgery to make sure the scheduled anesthesiologist was in-network. Absolutely, the office manager replied. Not so much the day of surgery, when a different — out-of-network — anesthesiologist was substituted in at the last minute. That’s how a $1500 bill became a $15,000 one.

There is only word for a fractured health care “system” this unresponsive to the needs of patients and the requirements of contract law: broken.

20 Democratic-led states ask SCOTUS to review the 5th Circuit's ACA opinion

The Washington Post was one of the first on this story, but there will be dozens more before the day is over. I'll track the best of the opinion pieces in future posts.

There's every reason to think the Supreme Court will decline the request: the decision wasn't final (there was a remand back to Dist. J. Reed O'Connor to reconsider the severability issue), there's no circuit conflict, and it would be a huge partisan issue during a presidential election year. On the other hand, four justices can grant review, so the five conservatives can't stop four more moderate-to-liberal justices from accepting review. Even if that happens, there are a number of obstacles between the grant and an opinion on the merits, including a DIG (dismissal as improvidently granted). Stay tuned . . .

Link to Professor Bagley‘s commentary on Fifth Circuit ACA opinion

His NEJM argument is laid out in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/affordable-care-acts-unconstitutional-flaw/603871/.

More on the Fifth Circuit’s partisan hatchet job in the ACA case

University of Michigan’s Nicholas Bagley does a fine job of shredding the logic of the court’s opinion in an article posted online today by the New England Journal of Medicine. Good luck getting a copy if you're not a subscriber and don't have access through an institutional library. Try Googling; you might find a version online.