How big a difference do properly used car seats actually make?

So I think the first, most important thing for people to recognize is that car seats and booster seats are awesome, and they do an incredibly good job of protecting kids from serious injury and death in car crashes.

I think we focus a lot on how complicated they can be to use, and people really obsess around using them properly.

We know that about 80% of families will make mistakes when they use a car seat, and that's not the family's fault.

I wanna be really clear about that.

Car seats are challenging.

We did a study in our institution about 10 years ago on the mother/baby unit with new parents going home from the hospital, looking at how they would use their car seat without assistance from a car seat technician, and we found that over 95% of those families were making serious mistakes.

Yeah.

Dr. Ben Hoffman is a professor of pediatrics at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and the past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Being able to procure, store, and deliver vaccines in a clinical setting is a really complicated endeavor.

And it requires resources within the clinical setting to order vaccines, whether it's from the manufacturer or a broker or from the state.

The practice has to lay out the money to purchase X number of doses of a vaccine, put it in storage, and over time hope that they will give enough of the vaccine so that they make back the money they spent.

So for example, a pediatric visit, 30 minutes with your primary care provider to do things like injury prevention, obesity prevention, vaccines, is valued at about a tenth of a orthopedic procedure that may take the same amount of time.

The fact that Medicaid pays so much more poorly than Medicare translates both to payment that pediatricians receive from Medicaid, but also from commercial insurance.

In most circumstances, commercial or private insurance will pay more for the same service than Medicaid will.

And as a result, it can be challenging for a lot of pediatricians, especially if they're in private practices, to be able to balance their books if they're seeing a significant portion of patients who have Medicaid just because the payment is so much less.