NYT: Health clinics for routine services being set up in chain stores

Attention Shoppers: Low Prices on Shots in Clinic
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
Published: May 14, 2006


(David Scull for The New York Times)
The MinuteClinic in a CVS store in Bethesda, Md., offers its customers a number of vaccines.

Everyday low prices on strep-throat exams.

That is the basic idea behind a retail approach to routine medical care now catching on among consumers and entrepreneurs. At Wal-Mart, CVS and other chain stores, walk-in health clinics are springing up as an antidote to the expense and inconvenience of full-service doctors' offices or the high-cost and impersonal last resort of emergency rooms.

For a $30 flu shot, a $45 treatment for an ear infection or other routine services from a posted price list, patients can visit nurse practitioners in independently operated clinics set up within the stores — whose own pharmacies can fill prescriptions....

***

About 100 of these clinics, which typically lease space from the host stores, are now operating around the nation. Hundreds more are in the works, bankrolled by a range of competing entrepreneurs who include Stephen M. Case, the former AOL chairman; Richard L. Scott, who once ran the nation's largest hospital chain; and Michael Howe, a former chief executive of the Arby's restaurants group.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, those executives and others share a concept of "consumer-directed health care" — a marketing and political term that usually means higher out-of-pocket medical costs — as a mass-market opportunity. Even some family physicians say the clinics may have their place in the array of American medical offerings.

And most insurers so far are welcoming retail clinics as a way to save money. The uninsured, meanwhile, typically find the clinics more affordable than most alternatives — including the for-profit storefront clinics that have long offered a full range of physician-provided medical services to a walk-in clientele....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/business/14clinic.html

but that's just me. I'd be delighted to see those things open up around here. There are so many uninsured people in this state, which has something like 90% HMO coverage for the people who are lucky enough to have it.

Having basic physicals and immunizations reasonably priced is a stopgap measure but it is a vitally important one to poor folks like me with no insurance and no hope of getting insurance.

However, nothing less than single payer will do. The system is irretrievably broken. It can no longer be patched up by schemes that leave the insurance companies in control.

I don't quite trust stores who are making money off both the medical care and the prescriptions. I wonder if the practitoners are pressured to prescribe medicine whether the patient needs it or not.