Ben White

Need-Fulfilling Strategies & Future Self-Continuity

05.28.24 // Finance

Via Loaded by Sara Newbomb:

“Specifically, when the future self shares similarities with the present self, when it is viewed in vivid and realistic terms, and when it is seen in a positive light, people are more willing to make choices today that may benefit them at some point in the years to come.” —Hal Hershfield.

Hershfield’s research suggests that the more we visualize our future self as really, specifically being just like us, the better we are able to act on current plans that feel deprivational to provide for the future.

Does your salary come from your employer? Not at all! Your employer is simply renting your time and skills. Your salary is the result of your internal resources being turned into a valuable asset that you lease to your employer in the form of labor. Your skills are the asset. Your salary comes from you.

You are your most important asset-generating resource to nurture and protect.

Just like your future self doesn’t benefit if you go sprinting on the hedonic treadmill, your future self also doesn’t benefit if you burn out so badly that you jeopardize your ability to work in your profession at a high level. You have needs now and in the future, and neither should be ignored.

Newcomb’s nice section on needs starts with our old friend Maslow:

It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency. —Maslow, 1943, p. 375

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a single word from the “hierarchy of needs” primary source before.

Then, we combine that with this less staid perspective of wants versus needs:

Every moment each human being is doing the best we know at that moment to meet our needs. We never do anything that is not in the service of a need. There is no conflict on our planet at the level of needs. We all have the same needs. The problem is in strategies for meeting the needs. —Marshall Rosenberg

And she brings that around to personal finance:

How many times have you tried to cut back on a certain expense only to find yourself splurging later? This comes from the fact that what we have called wants are actually needs. The core message of Rosenberg’s work was that every action a person takes is intended (consciously or unconsciously) to meet a basic need, and that our needs are universal. Any one of our needs might feel more important than another in a given situation, depending on the person and the circumstance. On one day, you may feel a powerful need for intimacy. The next, you may desperately seek solitude.

[…]

Very often, when people are trying to make ends meet, their first strategy is to start cutting expenses. While this is a great instinct, and we often do want to cut back on our spending, the problem with this approach is that if you do not take the time to ask yourself what need that expense was meeting, you will find that your new budget is very uncomfortable. Just like a dieter who restricts himself too much only to find himself eating an entire pizza in a late-night frenzy, we can do more harm to our finances than good by ignoring our needs when we cut our expenses.

Her rule of thumb:

If everyone cannot have it at once, it’s a strategy, not a need. Dig deeper to find the real need.

Wants are strategies for filling needs. The need is non-negotiable, but the strategy is mutable.

  1. Yes, I’ve started the process of creating a small dedicated job board just for independent radiologist-owned private practices. With all the corporate noise out there, I’m hoping we can connect radiologists looking for the real deal with those groups who are doing it. Still a ways to go, but feel free to reach out to me at ben@benwhite.com if your group is interested, and I’ll get back to you when things are ready.
  2. Separately, yes, for the first time in this site’s 15-year history, I’ve decided to run a real ad. Not a banner ad (and no images), but starting on June 1st, there will be a single monthly post featuring a limited number of true radiology private practices. I’ve temporarily changed this policy because of the radiologist shortage combined with the current less-than-stellar recruitment/marketing environment. I hope folks find it unobtrusive and even helpful; I’ll reevaluate in a year.
// 05.20.24

The Best Radiology Setup/Workstation Equipment

05.13.24 // Radiology

Here is the updated first entry in a series of posts about radiology tools, ergonomics, and efficiency. This includes the go-to stuff I use every day to practice diagnostic radiology, (briefly) how I use them, and a few alternatives. This series is the result of a lot of research, trial and error, and input from others in the radiology community.

Unnecessary caveat: There is no real best anything. Here’s what I have idiosyncratically landed on as a stable happy set-up that balances efficiency and comfort (and an editorial selection of those favored by others).

We get into more workflow details and justifications in the other posts, but we can summarize my personal approach as a hands-free microphone solution, a vertical mouse with some–but not a comical number of–programmable buttons–and a left-hand device that adds additional hotkey efficiency as well as—critically!—a way to scroll with my nondominant hand in order to spread the love across multiple joints.
Continue Reading

We’re Hiring (including a new teleradiology swing shift)

05.11.24 // Radiology

I’ve been seeing increasing news coverage of the nationwide radiology shortage, so it’s about time for me mention again: like every other practice in the country, my group is also hiring!

American Radiology Associates is a 100%-independent physician-owned radiology practice in Dallas-Forth Worth (of which I am a partner/shareholder). We’re privademic: we have part of the practice that works with the Baylor Dallas radiology residency, and we have part of the practice that does not. I enjoy a nice mix.

We’re hiring for breast, body, neuro, neuro IR, NM/PET, and general.

While our partners are generally in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, we have just created a new subspecialized 100%-remote partnership-eligible swing shift position (separate positions for general/body and for neuro). The swing shift will be 1pm-10pm central time, weekdays (M-F) alternating every other week + 13 weekends of call (yes that means mostly weekdays and not 7/7, and never any deep nights or super weird circadian-destroying hours).

(We’re also open to normal daytime remote employees, particularly body/general.)

So if you’re in the market, come work with me and check out our great team in Dallas. If you’re interested, send your CV to careers@americanrad.com and CC me at ben.white@americanrad.com.

Continue Reading

The SAVE In-School Loophole

05.01.24 // Finance

I wrote about this last September, but it’s important enough that I’ll repeat myself with more bullet points and shorter sentences.

The Summary

  • The new SAVE student loan plan has a generous unpaid interest subsidy: every dollar of accrued interest that isn’t covered by your monthly payment is waived.
  • SAVE also has a feature (“loophole”) that allows some borrowers to enter repayment early and benefit from that 100% subsidy on unpaid interest, effectively making qualifying loans (Grad PLUS loans, old loans from undergrad) interest-free while in school.

The Background

  • The SAVE plan’s 100% unpaid interest subsidy is a significant benefit, especially for those with low incomes that allow for qualifying $0 payments.
  • Normally, you cannot enter repayment for the loans you take out while in school. As in, you cannot enter repayment during medical school for the regular Direct Unsubsidized (“Stafford”) loans you take out to pay for medical school. Ditto for undergrad loans during undergrad.
  • There are two exceptions: 1) Grad PLUS loans 2) Regular Direct loans taken out for previous schooling (e.g. undergraduate loans while in graduate school)

The Benefit

  • Graduate students like medical students with undergraduate loans can waive the in-school deferment and enjoy 0% interest on those undergrad loans during graduate school.
  • Graduate students with new PLUS loans can waive the in-school deferment and also benefit from the subsdized interest rate during school.
  • (The income limit for an individual to have $0 loans in the continental US is ~$32,800, so you can earn some money and still do this.)

The Risk

  • PLUS loans have higher interest rates and origination fees. While the interest rate will be lower in school with this loophole, the origination fee is unavoidable. If/once you make enough money to lose out on the unpaid interest subsidy, PLUS loans have higher rates.
  • The temptation to try to exclusively use PLUS loans to benefit from the subsidy is risky as the SAVE program isn’t codified in law, and PLUS loans cannot be converted to conventional unsubsidized loans. You’re also really not supposed to, your school may not let you, and those schools that do could ultimately get in trouble for going out of order and lose access to the Direct loan program.

The Plan

  • Contact your servicer and request the removal of the in-school deferment.
  • Choose the SAVE plan and make monthly payments. Unless you are gainfully employed, it will likely be $0. If you have a working spouse who earns a substantial income, you may need to file taxes separately in order to exclude their income and benefit the most from the subsidy.
  • You will need to repeat the process every semester for new loans as your school will update your servicer that you’re in school and the servicer will automatically apply the in-school deferment.
  • If for some reason you want to stop repayment (e.g. get a good job while in school, get married and don’t want to file taxes separately), no biggie. You still have access to the in-school deferment while in school.

PSLF?

  • The extra effort and decreased interest have no benefit if you achieve Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), as PSLF is a time-based program. It doesn’t matter how much you owe.
  • However, this technique could still be a reasonable hedge given you never know what kind of job you’ll end up wanting/taking.

 

 

The tale of case review at Cigna in ProPublica:

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

[…]

The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.

[…]

As ProPublica and The Capitol Forum reported last year, Cigna built a computer program that allowed its medical directors to deny certain claims in bulk. The insurer’s doctors spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each of those cases.

// 04.30.24

Needless Customer Antipathy

04.29.24 // Medicine

Luminello, my wife’s (now former) small practice EHR, just shut down, so I thought we’d end our sold-to-private-equity-just-to-be-shuttered-with-gusto story with a final litany of needless suffering and smarm.

Timing

To pressure people to switch to SimplePractice, busy psychiatrists running small private practices were given just two months before their current EHR shut down to research, pick, and migrate to a completely new platform. The plan for this acquisition was presumably always to shut the smaller company down and use its customers to gain a toehold in the physician market. Remove the time pressure so that people have the breathing room to look around, and you might lose some of the customers you bought.

Now technically the April 19th shutdown just was for solo practices. Group practices actually had longer to figure stuff out: until June 14. Haha wait just kidding SimplePractice just changed their mind: now it’s May 15.

Bulk Download

Luminello created a bulk download function to export charts as PDF files. The service intermittently worked and sometimes took over a week to generate the zip file. With that kind of uncertainty, some users felt compelled to request their downloads in advance to make sure they were ready to migrate to a new platform before the shutdown. Little did they know that Luminello would decide the feature was a one-time process and disable the button after using it. The patient care information generated while using the EHR after making the request wasn’t included, which would mean lots of manual document saving.

With enough complaining, you could get them to turn it back on.

Read-only

Luminello repeatedly advised users over and over that access would become “read-only” on April 19th and that no more changes could be made after that date.

Instead, on April 19th, current users were greeted by only the magic bulk download button. You can’t actively look at the EHR contents, and anything not included in that bulk download (calendar, billing, etc) is totally unavailable. That is not what “read-only” means to literally anyone.

They quietly changed the language and now call it “export-only mode.”

People complained.

Users were told that they could have access reinstated if they opt-in to transfer to SimplePractice (and then opt out again before the assigned transfer date if they don’t want SimplePractice to have their data for no reason). An example:

Maybe a monthly fee or two for SimplePractice doesn’t seem like enough money for this to be worth it, so one possible explanation is that this last-minute rug-pull is to juice the opt-in numbers of switching customers so that the sale looks better. For what it’s worth, $3.6 million of the buyout was reportedly tied to post-sale metrics. One imagines this is one of them. Encouraging people to fake switch makes a lot more sense if there are a few million bucks in pending performance payments. (Note: What’s happening is what’s happening. Why it’s happening is just my guess.)

Billing

Last fall, after Luminello sold but while they were still maintaining that nothing was changing, they changed their billing plan from monthly to annual. My wife and many others paid for a full year. At some point later into that new payment term, SimplePractice announced that Luminello was shutting down. (They did eventually switch back to offering monthly billing before the announcement.)

They stated no refunds would be forthcoming.

After a lot of bitching online, Luminello agreed to refund people for the unused months of a product that was shuttered in the middle of a prepaid cycle. I’ll believe it when I see it.

But, for those on the re-instated monthly plan, Luminello has continued to freshly bill some customers after the service closed and entered read-only “export-only” mode. In addition to general incompetence, it’s hard to ignore the more cynical possibility that they assume a fraction of the overbilling will be overlooked or accepted because any customer service interaction or credit card dispute is a hassle that takes time.

Data Shenanigans

One of the fun things in SimplePracrice’s terms of service is that they want to play with your data:

Nevermind that the software you use for patient care has no business pretending to own people’s private health information or your practice’s work, but I personally find it offputting that they want to use everyone’s practice information for data mining and other sketchy stuff like some tech bro startup. I don’t think anybody wants their notes to be used without specific permission or compensation for training some AI tool (or anything else).

The Irony

The irony here is that by most accounts, SimplePractice is actually a decent product. It has a clean design and is—as promised—simple to use. While some of the physician features (better templates and dot phrases) are not fully baked and others don’t exist (lab/imaging order integration, flowsheets for vitals etc), the mission-critical ones like e-prescribe are now functional as promised.

If they had just waited a few months to actually have a physician ready EHR ready to demo and use before all this drama and communicated better, they would’ve had a higher sign on rate and fewer angry physicians.

And to their defense, this isn’t Vista Equity Partners Management’s first rodeo. I would guess that–despite a vocal contingent of very upset physicians–the majority of doctors took the path of least resistance and stayed with them as customers. Researching the EHR market and migrating to a new platform on short notice is really hard.

Reportedly, for many users, the migration process has been relatively smooth, even if customer service isn’t always helpful.

Everything I’ve described here and in the last post is entirely needless.

The foundational problem here is that there is a difference between having a good product and being a good company. What does it mean for healthcare if we keep rewarding the not-so-good companies?

FTC Attempts to Ban Noncompetes

04.24.24 // Medicine, Miscellany

Yesterday, the FTC passed its proposed ban on noncompetes along party lines.

This is not a done deal. The US Chamber of Commerce (which is a large lobbying organization, not a part of the government) intends to sue immediately, and they won’t be alone. Among other complaints, the Republican members of the committee who voted against it and the future litigants do not believe the FTC has the authority to do this.

The FTC’s final rule–including a very long full discussion of their rationale and authority–is here.

One of the exceptions of interest to those following consolidation in healthcare:

The final rule does not apply to non-competes entered into by a person pursuant to a bona fide sale of a business entity.

The original proposal had a limitation to the sale exception that defined a “substantial owner, substantial member, and substantial partner” to “mean an owner, member, or partner holding at least a 25 percent ownership interest in a business entity.”

The final rule does not require the seller to have a minimum ownership stake for the exception to apply.

This presumably means that, for example, all doctors who sell their practices to private equity are still bound by their noncompetes, regardless of practice size. (Non-legacy “partners” who weren’t partners at the time of sale would be free).

The new rule, if it survives, will be retroactive to essentially all noncompetes starting on the effective date ~120 days from now.

The FTC has argued it has authority over at least some nonprofits here. They bookend their argument thusly:

The final rule applies to the full scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction. Many of the comments about nonprofits erroneously assume that the FTC’s jurisdiction does not capture any entity claiming tax-exempt status as a nonprofit. Given these comments, the Commission summarizes Commission precedent and judicial decisions construing the scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction as it relates to entities that claim tax-exempt status as nonprofits and to other entities that may or may not be organized to carry on business for their own profit or the profit of their members.

[…]

The Commission stresses, however, that both judicial decisions and Commission precedent recognize that not all entities claiming tax-exempt status as nonprofits fall outside the Commission’s jurisdiction.

See pages 50-54 of the final rule above for their argument regarding jurisdiction over nonprofits.

The only true exceptions to the ban are senior executives and the bona fide sale provision.

The press release is here.

If you have HBO Max, standup comic Alex Edelman’s one-man show was excellent. The official description of its main narrative thread: “In the wake of a string of anti–Semitic threats pointed in his direction online, standup comic Alex Edelman decides to go straight to the source; specifically, Queens, where he covertly attends a meeting of White Nationalists.” Here’s the trailer.

// 04.21.24