The Phisher Price

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Check out this junk mail “Order Form” that came in the mail today.  It’s like the paper/snail mail version of an online phishing scam. It’s an order form for 1,000 nitrile exam gloves for $1,378.00.

Of course this is absurd and all that. Don’t worry, I’m not here to preach about that, none of our brilliant readers would ever pay $1.30 per exam glove.

I was just thinking that they wouldn’t waste a stamp sending this to me and likely thousands of others, if somebody at a hospital somewhere wasn’t just blindly filling it out and sending a check. To many healthcare facilities in America, money has become some surreal non-objective, meaningless thing–monopoly money. We’ve all heard the stories of hospitals billing patients/insurance $500 for a Tylenol, $3,000 to put in one stitch, etc. I have little doubt that a hospital who charged $500 for a Tylenol would pay $1,400 for a couple boxes of exam gloves (indeed…if they paid $1,400 for gloves they’d have to charge $500 for a Tylenol.) We in DPC understand this as well as anybody and we actively resist all this insanity.

The fact that this snail-mail phisher even exists demonstrates that it’s nothing for some poorly-supervised hospital system materials buyer somewhere to mindlessly pay $1.30 per exam glove. (For comparison, I’m currently paying 4 cents per glove through a group purchasing deal made available to me through the DPC Alliance–a price I’d like to see come down!)

So let this ridiculousness serve as our periodic reminder to:  

Happy Cutting!

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About Vance Lassey, MD

Dr. Lassey earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine and completed his residency at the Smoky Hill Family Medicine Program, where he served as the chief resident. He went on to practice rural inpatient, outpatient, emergency room, and obstetric care, in Holton, Kansas. He found the calling he loved to have been hijacked by middlemen. Stuck in a broken system, mired in bureaucracy, clicking boxes, coding, not seeing his family, and hearing patients complain bitterly about medical costs he had no ability to control, Direct Primary Care (DPC) became the solution for him, his family, and his patients. He is passionate about restoring the physician-patient relationship, bringing transparency and sanity to medical costs, and advises physicians around the country on how to get out of the FFS system. He serves as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, is the recipient of numerous clinical and teaching awards, and is a founding member and the past President of the Direct Primary Care Alliance.