Content about Health care in the United States

Have a colonoscopy performed in some parts of the U.S., and it’ll cost you and your health plan as much as $9,000 or more, versus a few hundred dollars in most of the rest of the developed world, even with countries whose healthcare systems are on par with ours in terms of quality rankings and outcomes. The average hip replacement costs $40,364 here, compared with $7,731 in Spain. An M.R.I. scan in the U.S. runs $1,121, vs. $319 in the Netherlands. And a hospital stay will cost “about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer.”

Healthcare professionals working within the growing field of convenient care convened Tuesday for the sixth annual Retail Clinician Education Congress, a three-day educational and networking forum that is accredited for both nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

This month Walgreens announced that it would begin to offer chronic care services at its Take Care Clinics. Its biggest competitor, MinuteClinic, made a similar announcement about a year ago. With full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the people paying the bills are going to get a good look at what retail clinics can do to lower costs and improve outcomes.

A new Kalorama Information report found that most patients — 91% — who had used a retail clinic were either satisfied or very satisfied with their visit.

The findings are in line with prior studies, which have long been reported by Drug Store News, and are yet further evidence that retail clinics are playing a vital role in the U.S. healthcare system.

Opponents of health reform are usually quick to make comparisons between our nation’s healthcare system and that of the rest of the world. Americans, they argue, enjoy the most advanced and most effective health care in the world. And forcing the U.S. system to change – either through new, evidence-based government payment incentives, federally mandated quality and cost controls, or through new methods for delivering primary care or making health decisions on behalf of patients – would only jeopardize the patient-doctor relationship and undermine the best healthcare network in the world.

Those opponents of change are wrong, in part because they’re willing to accept the status quo for U.S. health care, which is unsustainable for the simple reason that the nation can’t afford the current fee-for-service health system and its skyrocketing costs. But they’re also wrong because they’re proceeding from a flawed assumption: that our health system is tops among all nations.

A new study indicates that the public bears "unnecessary expense" when generic drugs aren't used.

A new Rand Corp. study examining the impact of retail medical clinics on the receipt of primary medical care found mixed evidence about whether the clinics may disrupt doctor-patient relationships.

The U.S. healthcare system's steady migration beyond the exclusive terrain of the physician practices, professional clinics and hospitals — and into the far more accessible and more cost-conscious world of retail pharmacy and health — continues to accelerate. The shift is dramatically expanding access to health services for millions of patients — many of them uninsured or underinsured — and elevating the status of retail clinicians and community pharmacists.

With the growth of consumer-driven care and more of the burden of managing costs falling on patients’ shoulders, there’s no doubt that patients are responding to the convenient, cost-effective health care provided by retail health clinics. Further evidence of this is the recent results of the Harris Interactive poll.

Big news for SoloHealth as the number of consumer interactions made at its health-and-wellness kiosks surpassed 2.5 million while the company works toward its goal of 2,500 retail kiosks by mid-2013. But it is perhaps even bigger news for the future of the overall U.S. healthcare system.

The idea of pharmacists as the most accessible healthcare professionals isn't just some hokey marketing gimmick: It's a readily observable fact, and one that will become increasingly important as retail pharmacies and retail clinics play a greater role on the front lines of care.