For those just now realizing insurers don’t care if you live or die— 🚨🚨🚨Insurers do not care if you live or die. In fact, death is highly cost effective, especially if it is fast, and especially if you are chronically ill. Up to 25% of all Medicare expenditures are spent on the last 12 months of life. Insurers would love to eliminate that, as the cost of care >>> premiums collected at that point. Remember that what you call healthcare, they call LOSS — as in, their medical LOSS ratio being the how much $ of premiums is spent on medical care. And they would love to cut the loss, for our (unfortunately) most vulnerable populations — elderly, chronically ill, with little support.

Here’s the dirty secret of emergency medicine: We don’t have to do prior auth. Like ever. We just order what the patient needs, and the patient gets it done in the ED. But here’s why we care about prior auth anyways: B/c not a shift goes by where a patient doesn’t land in the ER as a last resort when #priorauth denied or delayed them the outpatient care they needed.