Health Insurance Blog

‘Our child are the most precious gift we have. Whenever they are in pain we suffer their pain and if you suspect that your child might have strep throat or an ear infection, you need to take care of them immediately but to get an appointment with pediatrician is not so easy, or to wait in the doctor’s office as well.

Every parent has faced this dilemma. But now there are new options coming up,courtesy of the competitive market. Retail Health Clinics are opening in big stores and local pharmacies around the country where you will be seen by a nurse practitioner within 15 minutes most likely getting a prescription that you can fill right there, Generally cost of the visit varies from $40 to $60.

Prices vary for different services like flu shots($15-$30) to care for allergies poison ivy and pink eye($50-$60) and tests for chloresterol, diabetes and pregnancy( less than $ 50).

No appointment is necessary, open day time, evenings and weekends.These clinics are creating new model with more limited services at lower prices and almost always staffed by nurses.There are about 325 of these retail clinics operating nationwide today. Seventy six of them are in Wal-Marts in 12 states and it will expand to 400 clinics by the end of the decade and 2000 in five to seven years.

The nurses staffing the clinics are under physician supervision and follow strict protocols, if problems are more serious . And the clinics create computerized patient records accessible through out the chain, can also be emailed and send fax to a hospital or doctors if needed.

These clinics are attractive to the 4.5 million people who have health insurance with higher deductible and want an affordable option for some of their regular care. These will be run by outside firms including for-profit ventures like Redclinic as well as local and regional health plans and hospitals.

And competition also worked to force prescription drug prices down: When Wal-Mart announced last year that it was dropping the price of several hundred generic medicines to $4 for a month’’s supply, other pharmacies, from Target to corner drug stores, followed suit.

Wal-Mart now says that a third of all prescriptions filled at its pharmacies are for the $4 generics, and 30% of them are filled by people without insurance. Because health care is largely regulated and licensed at the state level, some states are more friendly than others at having non-physicians deliver care.

Government can get in the way, of course, with protectionist policies that throw up more regulatory barriers to entry. With many congressional leaders hostile to free-market solutions, these policy changes are unlikely in the next two years. But as consumers get a taste of what consumer-friendly health care is like, they may well demand that the top-down, centralized health-care delivery of the 20th century give way to a system more in tune with the demands of 21st-century consumers seeking greater value and efficiency.

Critics of engaging private competition in the health sector will argue that the vast majority of health-care dollars are spent on a relatively small percentage of patients with serious illness, especially those with multiple chronic conditions. This industry is on its infancy and gradually increase day by day. Retail clinics could be just the beginning of consumer friendly innovation. And it is helping everyday, people who haven’t got insurance and also people who are in immediate need.