With exception to the Swine Flu running rampant in space you inhabit, or maybe a weather forecast for a sunny Friday after a long work week, no one truly plans to be sick. So when you develop a nasty cough or stubborn fever, you're left with a few choices. Primary Care Physicians, who serve as gatekeepers to your medical records, are usually booked up for days during cold and flu season. The emergency room is no place for the flu. Aside from your obviously non-life-threatening condition, you'd wait hours to see a doctor and pay out your stuffy nose for the inconvenience. You could bury your head under the covers, chicken noodle soup at your side, and tough it out like a soldier.
But if you're among the fortunate who have health coverage, your insurance company is urging you to get outta bed and go to the nearest walk-in clinic...and Stat! So is your local pharmacy, your boss and perhaps even, your workplace itself. It's not just because they have a stake in your health. There's a more valuable stake in you on Wall Street, too.
Humana, the employer and individual health insurance giant, becomes the latest corporation in a long line of others on the medical fringes to align with MinuteClinic, the retail healthcare division of CVS Caremark. CVS, you may recall, bolted on the Caremark name after it bought out the then-predominant mail order pharmacy company.
If you're scratching your head, it's no wonder. You're not imagining things. Healthcare really has become Big Brother. It's an industry that's so lucrative, yet so fraught with panic amidst a backdrop of threats from Congress about reform, that former companies are becoming kissing cousins through profit-sharing deals (like the MinuteClinic-Humana arrangement), or swallowed up whole by more nimble competitors with cash to burn.
As part of the Humana-MinuteClinic alliance, the 500-location walk-in medical center chain will market health screenings and wellness programs to Humana members. They also plan to build a shiny new stand-alone clinic for exclusive use by Humana employees and their families at its downtown Louisville, Ky. headquarters. For the most part, MinuteClinics are housed inside CVS pharmacy locations. Now that's one-stop shopping and streamlined revenue at its finest. But it's also a model of healthcare efficiency and a sign of more consolidating to come, say proponents of the deal.
Not to be outdone, CVS' rival, Walgreens, also has its own convenient in-store retail healthcare unit, the Take Care Clinic chain. Even the Target retail chain is getting in on the trend of no-appointment-necessary medicine with a pilot Target Clinic program at select stores in Minnesota and Maryland. Could Wal-Mart be next?
While privately owned urgent care clinics may seem intended for people with health insurance, they're becoming flexible in how they bill for services. Another walk-in medical facility, MedExpress, for example, accepts most types of Medicaid. The company's clinics also treat people without insurance, although they must pay $115 up front.
"Retail clinics are here to stay," says Dr. David Bronson, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic Medicine Institute. "That is the reality."
The reason so many quick-service clinics are sprouting up is because they want it that way and so do hospital corporations.
It's far less expensive for a carrier to pay a claim for service performed by a nurse technician, pharmacy or physician's assistant (as these clinics are typically staffed), than by an MD. And since they eliminate unnecessary visits to emergency rooms and unclog their waiting rooms for patients with true emergencies, even more cost-savings are built into the healthcare system.
If healthcare mergers are just starting up again now as the economy recovers,insurers and hospitals alike envision a day when we'll cure a cold, buy some milk, get our oil changed and make a bank deposit all in the same place. Only time will tell if the savings will trickle down enough so we can buy more chicken noodle soup, cough drops and OJ for the ride home.
To most people, health insurance is a card with numbers you take to the doctor's office and a little booklet of paper that lives in your filing cabinet, closet or dusty corner of your home. To McKinley, health insurance and the historical reforms that go along with the inequality of healthcare in America are topics of healthy discussion, worthy of further study and catalysts for education and action.
Mckinley moved to South Florida after directing corporate communications and marketing strategy for several FORTUNE 500 companies and public relations agencies. A founder of Communicatia, Ink (an independent marketing communications company he founded while working as a business reporter and radio newscaster in Nashville), McKinley is an emerging insurance subject matter expert.
