Dr. G. Keith Smith is a board certified anesthesiologist in private practice since 1990. In 1997, he co-founded The Surgery Center of Oklahoma, an outpatient surgery center in Oklahoma City, owned by 40 of the top physicians and surgeons in central Oklahoma. Dr. Smith serves as the medical director, CEO and managing partner while maintaining an active anesthesia practice.
At a physician’s roundtable years ago, I asked Senator Orrin Hatch why I couldn’t punch out of Social Security, happy to leave all that I had paid “into the system” on the table. Why couldn’t anyone, I asked, willing to leave behind all they had paid in, be allowed to walk away from these entitlements, […]
One of my partners, an ear nose and throat surgeon, resigned years ago from a particularly abusive HMO. He said, “never again,” as did all of the reputable ENT surgeons in the area, physicians whose practices were already busy without having to deal with this outfit. Even though many of the HMOs are long dead […]
How Zelis hopes to solve the healthcare financial system for payers and providers.
The strongest advocate for expanding Medicaid—and the likely source of funding for the massive advertising campaign—is the hospital lobby. We hear that hospitals are going broke. They can’t make ends meet. The uninsured are breaking the hospitals’ backs from emergency room over-utilization. Hospitals won’t survive unless Medicaid is expanded. (This is the most interesting claim, […]
After the election, a lot of people are excited that they can now get healthcare. Or maybe not quite yet, but by 2014, when ObamaCare is fully implemented. The only problem is that healthcare is not like an Obama phone. The phones are all made by a standard process in a factory, probably in China, […]