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Dr. Angelo Falcone

Healthcare Pressures Will Remain No Matter Who Wins Tomorrow – And Go Vote!

There are some who will tell you that the fate of America’s entire healthcare system hangs in the balance based on the outcome of tomorrow’s presidential election. To be sure, there are big differences between President Obama and Governor Romney. But the truth is that the pressures facing America’s healthcare system today are the same pressures […]

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Should ER Groups Use Locums? Passing the Baton in Connecticut

One of the first issues an emergency medicine group must address when they take over a new Emergency Department is whether to employ temporary locums providers to staff the department. The pressure is on to staff up, and many groups use locums as a stop-gap until they have hired full-time emergency physicians. Other groups may […]

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When Negotiations Break Down in a Near-Broken Healthcare System

As FierceHealthCare reported a few days ago, an emergency physicians group which staffs and manages two Emergency Departments outside Philadelphia has failed to come to an agreement on reimbursement rates with the region’s largest health insurer, Blue Cross. That won’t mean that people insured by Blue Cross will stop coming to the ER, of course. But […]

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The Supreme Court Decision: Who Pays?

Ten days prior to Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act, the LA Times published a story headlined with an decades-old question: “Who covers the uninsured?” Indeed, the question who pays has been central to the healthcare debate for decades. For those of us in Emergency Care, the Supreme Court answered that question […]

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Advance Directive: Allow Natural Death

The more I practice emergency medicine, the more I think about end of life care and the futility of much of what we do as patients try to complete their time on this earth. Many emergency physicians have been faced with the reality of “coding” an elderly nursing home patient because the family insists that […]

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Medicaid Rule for Emergency Departments Used a Hammer to Tighten a Screw

There are a thousand places to look for cost savings in healthcare, but this week in Washington State officials grappled with one of the most visible of those: emergency care. Thankfully, Washington Governor Christine Gregoire has suspended implementation of a rule that would have denied emergency rooms payment from Medicaid if the patient was diagnosed […]

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America’s Healthcare System Needs a Social Contract

As a citizen it’s easy to clamor for rights. It’s much harder to live up to our responsibilities. And so it is in health care. As citizens we have implicitly agreed to abide by a social contract, which means a person’s moral and political obligations are dependent on an agreement among them to form the […]

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We Want Our Healthcare Like We Want our Fast Food

With due respect to those patient souls among us, America is, in general, an impatient nation. That includes how we think about our healthcare. This is why I read with some interest, and some amusement, stories like “A real ‘doc fix,’” published this week in the New York Times. Basically it says we need to […]

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