- #36
BillTre
Science Advisor
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If I were setting this up from the higher level of national government, I would want something that would be quick and easy to set (for reasons of pandemic emergency), would provide the institutions doing the injections with a reasonable reimbursement, and distribute that pay in a simple (for the government) manner.Vanadium 50 said:The vaccine is free. The drugstore is allowed to charge my health insurance (actually, my pharmaceutical insurance) for the shot itself. If some uninsured comes in, it's still free to them. I don't know who, if anyone, they charge.
Therefore, it seems likely to me that the organization doing the injects (drug store or other retail places, or health care organizations of some kind, would be "billing" and passing that up in an efficient manner, to where the government could easily pay for it (or at least part of it).
This seems most likely to be send the bill (for compensation) to an insurance company (which are way smaller in number vs. drugstores and hospitals) and the government pays them.
It is also reusing an already established billing mechanism, to serve a slightly different purpose. So it should be easy to get it to work quickly.
I am guessing there are a lot of already established formulae for cost and expense of standard medical billing.
The uninsured would just be billed (with a special code) to an insurance company which would pass it on to the government.
Its all quick to set up and should work for a shared purpose that has life and death implications.
That should cut them some slack in allowing them to do certain things, but an economic entity (company) always wants more money, as a basic selective drive in the economic world (two opposed tensions on the determination of compensation).
I was thinking about that. Off the top of my head, I wasn't sure if it would or not.russ_watters said:Also, $2.59 seems unlikely. It would be hard to even pay the salaries of the stickers at that rate.
As far as I could tell, these not nurses, but something like a nursing assistant or trainee.
These are very easy injections to do. Intra Muscular in the arm. Can't miss that. Not easy to do harm.
Where I went, each injectee dealt with several people (greeters/informers/card checkers (probably a good fraction volunteer), someone telling the next person what station to go to, injector (sub-nurse in my experience), card filling out station/waiting area (probably had a nurse somewhere on site where I was (a central injection site)).
At each step there was one person dealing with the whole crowd, but there were maybe 10 sites doing the injections. So other than the injector labor, the accounting of labor of the other stations would be reduced by ~10.
In the drug store, its a single pharmasist, or a pharmacist aid, doing the injection at about 1/4 of the rate (my flu shot experience).
The people doing the injections may not get much of a wage, being low down on the health care hierarchy.
It might even be training situation. Learn how to deal with people, while you doing a really simple procedure and develop confidence and experience, but not getting much a wage.
However, I don't know what wages in healthcare are like for these kinds of employees.
When I employed a lot of people at a university where I worked, we would budget their labor at: cost of paying them plus 0.5 of the salary to account for all their benefits (on average) bundled together.
That's how we budgeted our labor cost (rate).
The university, however, had very good benefits, so the extra expenses would be less elsewhere.