The Health Care Blog

technical update

I have had a very bad experience with domain theft from a terrible company called primesource-hosting.com. So until I can get my domain back, the blog will appear here. This should be sorted out in a week or so. Please...

Medicare bill: not any time soon

So the NYT reports today that the Medicare bill compromise discussions between the teams from the house and the senate are being held up by a dispute on payments to rural hospitals. A dispute between different republicans! (Bill Thomas in...

Online detailing & prescribing: taking off at last?

In the midst of the e-health boom, there were a huge raft of companies hoping to profit from e-prescribing and e-detailing, and there were some very odd business plans about how to pay doctors to receive these "e-details". Well some...

Quickies: PBM stocks

Looks like the PBM stocks are now taking a downward move . Express Scripts' stock (ESRX) is under pressure partly following some comments from a short-seller in Barrons. Meanwhile, Medco (MHS)continues upwards. Some of this is probably caused by institutions...

Tenet reshuffles

Tenet changed management at its Redding, CA hospital on Friday. As discussed in an earlier blog, that hospital is where significant amounts of unnecessary surgery took place. This article from thestreet.com even goes as far as to suggest that Tenet...

PBMs: Quick update on Medco

So Medco has officially split off from Merck as of this week, and is trading separately on NYSE, ticker is MHS. The stock actually rose 10% its first day adding over $600m to Medco's market cap and (after accounting for...

Anti-clotting drugs: Not as good as angioplasty?

When I got into health care one of the big fusses was whether Genentech's Activase (TPA) was more effective than Streptokinase in clot-busting immediately after heart attacks. You may recall that in the late 1980s Genetech made its name and...

Quality Quickie

And on the "lighter" side, this news from Brazil shows that mistakes in health care can be made anywhere. but if you were this patient, wouldn't you notice?

Drug margins under fire

Today's NYT has an article (Reg Reqd) pointing out how vulnerable the PPI (ant--ulcer/anti-heartburn) drug market is to the oncoming generic versions of Prilosec. Prilosec has been about the most successful drug in history (somewhere around $6 bn a year...

A Quality Quickie

I've mentioned the quality issue a couple of times, and have somewhat denigrated the quality movement as being made irrelevant by the backlash against managed care. However, given the IOM's "To Err is Human" report on medical errors and more...

Performance-based pay in health care?

Given some off-this-stage politicking I've been involved in, the Medicare drug coverage argument, and the recent "Physicians" plan in JAMA proposing single-payer, this Forbes article caught my attention. I subscribed to Forbes for a while and they never ceased to...

PBMs face a little more mail-order trouble

Pity the poor PBM industry. Hailed in the early 1990s as the solution to manage health care costs, bought up by the drug industry for far, far too much money in the mid-1990s, and investigated on again/off again by various...

Quickie follow-up to Tenet story

Following my story about Medicare and Tenet, Thestreet.com has a review of how Tenet's top execs, including their Corporate counsel/head compliance honcho, took money off the table before the crash in the stock price after the latest scandal was revealed...

Jeanne Scott--an unabashed plug

If you don't already, go now and sign up for Jeanne Scott's newsletter on health care inside the beltway at her new site, right click on http://www.health-politics.com. Now you've done that let me tell you a bit about her. She...

Quality

All you need to know about health care quality is encapsulated in Ian Morrison's line--"you can tell a quality doctor when the people in the waiting room make more money than you do". The latest Harris Poll on the subject...

Does Disease Management Work?

Well in theory yes, but American Healthways just had to pay back $14 million to a health plan that obviously didn't get total satisfaction. The key issue was that they had agreed to an unmeasurable set of outcome measures.....and then...

Quickie 2: Pharma market research

My now defunct dotcom i-Beacon was buried deep in the Rx market research space (and, yes, the pun is deliberate). A new report from Cutting Edge Information suggests that we were onto something. (The report summary/ad piece is here, but...

A few quickies 1: Single payer rears its head, again!

Well Steffie and David are back on the single payer war-path, with an article in August 13 JAMA. While most of us in the real world agree with Ian Morrison that single-payer is "culturally unavailable" to Americans, Woolhandler and Himmelstein...

The first post: What's wrong with Medicare?

For the first post, don't expect a big essay despite that subject line. It came up because while I was away from the US for the first part of this year, yet another incarnation of NME or HCA -- the...

Welcome to the Health Care Blog

Welcome to the first post of The Health Care Blog. The phenomenon of blogging has taken over the web for politics, news and much else, but hasn't been seen much in health care. This blog will be my attempt to...