Cut Off From Ambulance Rides
In a story for Philly.com, Kaiser Health News reporter Lisa Gillespie explores the reasoning behind the pilot program—to cut down on improper payments, including fraud and abuse—and its unfortunate consequences for patients. After Medicare stopped paying for Prozzillo’s ambulance rides to and from dialysis, his wife and daughter took turns driving him, but while getting out of the car in his driveway one day, he fell and broke a hip. He died not long after.
“There should have been another alternative for him,” his daughter says. “He would have lived longer.” CMS expanded the pilot program to the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia in 2016. While Medicaid pays for nonemergency wheelchair van transport, Medicare does not.
Racism In The Hospital
Muslim-American neurology resident Altaf Saadi learned the hard way that attending a prestigious college and medical school (Yale and Harvard, respectively) could not shield her from experiences of racism and bigotry in America. In a post for Kevin MD, Saadi, the daughter of Iraqi and Iranian immigrants, shares some of the adversity she’s faced from her own patients on the basis of her religion and ethnicity.
Some bigotry is overt, but implicit racism in health care is more commonplace, she notes, and many racial, ethnic, and religious groups are affected. “We—as physicians and society more generally—must realize that the struggles of one marginalized community are struggles of all of us,” she writes.