Tony Dragovich

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

When I ran a clinic in the army you couldn’t have a wait list and had to see patients within a month. We opened the schedule the first day of every month. Patients would call and by noon the month would be full. You can’t mandate care and have it work out well. If you want good care at a good price you need private practice doctors and hospitals that run only ERs, ORs and hospital beds. Any system or universal model will be terrible for patients and probably great for the employees much like the VA system.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

Completely disagree. No doctor working in a hospital should be employed by it. There is no reason every doctor in a hospital cannot have a transparent fee, just like attorneys. The reason they do not is because they cannot because of Medicare and insurance contracts all paying different rates which are dictated to the doctor not really negotiated. The only option is to drop out of network. All of the employed physicians in a hospital bill separately whether they are hospital employees or not. The difference is if they are hospital employees they bill 3x what a private physician bills if in network. The shock on the out of network physicians is entirely due to insurance companies refusing to pay private doctors reasonable rates while they pay the hospital multiples more. If a hospital only ran ORs, ERs and inpatient beds medical costs in America would decrease 30% instantly.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@anish_koka I think there should be a 30 minute mandatory cultural sensitivity training slide deck so doctors are sensitive to bivocational farmers and truck drivers😁she said it people are dying from language…maybe even hers

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

It’s pretty easy on the right. If the drugs made you insane you wouldn’t be insane for 18 minutes. You wouldn’t be able to plan. You wouldn’t be coherent to talk to your husband. If you are taking a medication consistently the side effects and adverse events are consistent and persistent.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

Yep. Once private practice went away nobody with any knowledge or incentive could audit quality. When patients went to doctors the doctors then picked the hospital based on quality and the hospital monitored the doctors on quality. Patients picked doctors and if they didn’t like them could find another. Now with systems the doctors are widgets and the administrators treat patients as commodities. Patients are stuck with few options. Deregulation and return to private practice will fix healthcare. Anything toward more government intervention only makes it worse.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@MDMcDuff @ArthurBoreman So why are there any penalties for any murder? All the victims are dead?

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

Insane is different than demented. If you read any old testament bible you will see many, many examples of sacrifices to Molech. Many causes: demon possession, calculated, sacrifice…when a liberal western society founded on Judeo-Christian morales values “insanity” over the life of innocent children I do believe an ancient line has been crossed and the creator of the universe does indeed keep score. I’m just commenting on the books as written and have had no part in the actual creation of the physical world we live in. Insanity is a modern creation. Older writers had much more creative definitions such as ”Brothers Karamozov”. Isn’t everyone who kills insane? If so , isn’t everyone who kills not insane, because if it is always true it is never true.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

Is he saying being poor is the goal? Is it noble? Is it impossible to not be poor? Should not the goal to be to allow everyone to have a chance to not be poor? I’m pretty sure that government policies that pick winners and losers is the quickest way to authoritarianism and persistent poor.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@ArthurBoreman Cop out. It is a question to you.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

I would strongly recommend that every patient become the most pro-physician advocacy group in the country because no other ”stakeholder“ has any interest in the human being that is the patient. All of the other stakeholders, i.e. hospital systems, insurers, government, pharma, tech, PE, etc.., are so far removed from the actual patient that it becomes impossible for them to view an individual patient as anything other than a commodity. When that happens, as it is now, you get commoditized care, doctors are the patient facing widget of that system and get the blame from the patient but the real blame is the system that completely disempowered physician input.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@CallawayGolf I honestly don’t see the issue. It seems the driver causes some sort of violent disease in people who touch it. It is a spoof on some horror theme. How is anyone angry about this? It‘s actually not very good and a bad ad in my opinion but what was the inappropriate issue?

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

Have you ever been treated in a Veterans hospital or military hospital? I have worked in both. Long wait times, rationed care and Byzantine rules created by Harvard MBAs that are often contradictory. Universal healthcare would be that on steroids. Example, in order to not have a wait over 3 months or any “wait lists” our clinic schedule opened on the 1st work day of the month. By noon that day the month was full. Nobody waited more than a month and there was not wait list. Most of the inefficiency would be well hid, such as the VA using a completely different metric of physician/PA/NP productivity than the rest of the US. That is how you see 8 patients 4 days a week and are at max capacity. You are dreaming if you think it will work and overestimating how well it is working in other countries.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

There are already examples such as requiring beta blockers for all surgeries for patient with cardiac risk factors. Went on for years, couldn’t get paid unless beta blockers given and find out more strokes caused than heart attacks prevented. Every anesthesiologist knew it was a bad idea.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@carlyb_ I run a business use AI extensively and will still pay an accountant. There are an awful lot of subjective decisions that AI can’t manage AND AI is absolutely biased toward your biases. AI alone reinforces your blind spots

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

Dr. Anthony Fauci
May 16, 2021 (CBS “Face the Nation”): Discussing CDC guidance allowing fully vaccinated people to forgo masks, Fauci said vaccinated people become “dead ends” for the virus.
Exact quote: “When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that’s when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.”
He added that breakthrough infections were almost always asymptomatic with very low viral levels, making transmission “extremely unlikely—not impossible but very, very low likelihood.”https://t.co/NHf7wLVN5O
May 17/18, 2021 (MSNBC interview with Chris Hayes): Explaining the same CDC mask guidance: “The risk is extremely low of getting infected, of getting sick, or of transmitting it to anybody else, full stop.”
He affirmed that vaccinated people could feel safe they were not going to get infected (outdoors or indoors) based on accumulating https://t.co/EoxyV7Jo5V

Earlier (e.g., late 2020–early 2021), Fauci noted uncertainty about whether vaccines fully prevented asymptomatic infection/transmission while emphasizing strong protection against clinical disease. By mid-2021 he spoke more confidently of near-elimination of meaningful transmission risk based on then-available data (lower viral loads in breakthrough cases). In later testimony (2024), he stated that early vaccines did reduce infection and thus transmission, but durability against infection was more limited than initially apparent as variants emerged.

https://t.co/ujRTRzQakh
President Joe Biden

July 21, 2021 (CNN Town Hall with Don Lemon):
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
In the same appearance: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you are not going to die.”
(He also noted high protection against severe outcomes and that the vaccines covered the Delta variant.) Multiple outlets (AP, Snopes, CNN, Washington Post) fact-checked the absolute “not going to get COVID” phrasing as overstating efficacy, since breakthrough infections https://t.co/4WhEirELzT

October 7, 2021 (remarks in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, on vaccine requirements): Speaking about health-care workers: “...you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.”
PolitiFact rated similar claims as overstating the reduction in transmission (significant but not absolute).politifact.com

December 14, 2021 (interview): “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else.”
PolitiFact noted this conflicted with CDC statements that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections can still transmit the https://t.co/EdSlx292nl

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@MichaelGNanna @JAMA_current @CMSGov This is a standard “marketing” study. You create a study that doesn’t really show anyone just to point to “published data”. It’s the Purdue NEJM opioids aren’t addictive trick. The fact that JAMA published it shows you how corrupted by politically aligned interest they are.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

I’m sorry you can’t be serious. I’m not sure she can touch the backboard. She is a very talented girl. Why can’t that be enough? She will be a great female player and that should be celebrated and good enough. There are 100 male high school guards in most states that would shut her down. She is 5’8” with a female vertical. She is female, she isn’t going to grow more. Many high school guards can dunk and if she is playing a 6 foot guard who is bigger, faster and stronger it won’t go well. If you truly are a NBA writer you need to re-examine where you derive wisdom. You are divisive and causing girls unneeded stress and comparisons. It really is hateful.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

@TherealDoctorJ So what is the answer? I run a private practice more pay better hours and hiring is tough for us yet new grads flock to large systems. The cool aid has been very strong.

[Tony Dragovich @DragovichTony]

And the hospital billed the 25 modifier to bundle procedures which the doctor also did not bill. Whether the hospital is correct or not shouldn’t the doctor be upcoded also since it probably affects the bonus? At best this is poor self serving management at worst the hospital owes someone money.