The Health Care Blog

Political update on uninsurance story

For more on the issue of how many uninsured there really are and how long they are uninsured for, go look at The Bloviator's post. His and my conclusion is that the Census Bureau has mislabeled the 15.3% of the...

Uninsurance: the numbers go way up.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out (although The Bloviator pointed the way yesterday and he's as smart as a rocket scientist). An increase in unemployment plus fewer people getting health insurance at work has led to...

PBM quickie: Feds join lawsuit against Medco

The Feds have backed two whistleblower suits against Medco. The allegations claim that Medco used a variety of techniques to favor Merck (which owned Medco at the time) and was paid $430m in 2001 to switch scripts from Merck's competitors....

Schering Quickie

In this post a while back I wrote about the problems that mid-market pharma companies are having dealing with patent expirations. The Jenks Health Care Report has an article on the future of Schering Plough available here , which goes...

The Bloviator and the uninsured

A terrible title, but if you're enjoying reading this blog the other one I've found with the closest flavor is the excellent The Bloviator, written by Ross Silverman, a lawyer/public health professor at Southern Illinois University (and a Red Sox...

Tenet's counsel can't stand the heat

Modern Healthcare reports that Tenet's embattled Chief Counsel Christi Sulzbach has quit. She cited external pressures as her reasons for stepping down, including criticism from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley . Seems like after articles like this she wasn't going to...

Why Wall Street hates health care services but doesn't know it.

In a news article titled HealthSouth Scandal Doesn't Slow Former Chief the New York Times' Milt Freudenheim profiles former Healthsouth CEO Richard Scrushy. Healthsouth was in may ways a corollary of Columbia/HCA and Medpartners. Whereas Columbia was hospitals and MedPartners...

More on the underbelly of pharma marketing: State of Mass sues drug makers

Massachusetts is suing drug makers for ripping off the state's Medicaid program. But note carefully, they're suing generic drugmakers. I thought generics were supposed to be cheap! The suit accuses the generic-makers of a familiar tactic. Selling the drugs to...

More on nursing staff ratios, from Matt Quinn

Just when I was wondering what to write today, Matt Quinn comes to the rescue again......Linda Aitken, who's study on nursing education I wrote about yesterday, also wrote an article last year about the impact of staff ratios. This is...

Very funny

FDA Approves Sale Of Prescription Placebo as reported by The Onion. You know it's only 90% a joke.

Tenet quickie: another arrest!

A mid-level executive from a Tenet hospital in San Diego was indicted yesterday, joining her boss who's already in hot water for setting up a $10 million kickback scheme to generate patient referrals. This reminds me a little of when...

Quality Quickie: Better educated nurses make the hospital safer?

Linda Aitken has been the leading academic looking at nursing professionals in the US for several years. (Ed O'Neill has been her opposite number on the physician side). Aitken's latest research is going to put the cat amongst the pigeons...

Technical Note: RSS Feed & thanks to other HC bloggers

With help from fellow Bloggers--and a slightly more aggressive effort at understanding Blogger's not always crystal-clear help function-- I think I have an RSS feed up and running here. There's a little RSS icon in the right sidebar that links...

Technical Note:RSS

I've been asked by a few readers to provide an RSS feed. I've tried without success to do this using Blogger. Can anyone who knows more about Blogger than me do me a favor and walk me through the steps?...

Got the Blues? WellPoint keeps growing, so does Anthem

Yesterday the shareholders of the Wisconsin Blue Cross plan, Cobalt, OKed the WellPoint Merger originally announced back in June. So Wellpoint keeps growing. It now has Blue Cross of California, Missouri, Wisconsin and several other national products. Anthem--originally Blue Cross...

Health care IT spend up sharply

iHealthbeat (reg rqd) put me onto this Information week article which says that health care organizations report that their spending on IT has gone from 2.7% of revenues to 3.3% in the past year. That's a pretty big jump of...

Medicaid--a bleak picture gets bleaker

It's remarkable how badly most health care observers understand Medicaid. But once you understand Medicaid, it's less remarkable, because it's so darned complicated! Many people think that Medicaid covers the poor and uninsured. In fact it covers some sub-segments of...

Cronkite sued: A view into the underbelly of drug marketing

The headline says Drug ads row snares Cronkite. Walter Cronkite remains the most trusted source of news among senior Americans. According to his version of events, he thought that he had signed a contract to make educational programs about new...

Employer-based health insurance is dissolving quite fast

A newer study based on Bureau of Labor Statistics finds an acceleration in a trend that's been going on for a long time. Fewer employees are getting health insurance from their employer. The Boston Globe reports that: The study found...

Drug Distributors: Bergen hits a snag?

The stock prices of the big three drug distributors, Bergen Brunswick, McKesson and Cardinal Health have taken different courses over the last 5 years. Mckesson's ill-fated purchase of HBO & Company put the company into a funk from which it...

The NHS: IT in a mess?

Ok, that's a cheap shot title which I only used because "En Aithch Ess" rhymes with Mess. The UK's NHS is trying to pull off what we in American healthcare can only dream about -- a full computerization of the...

Technical snafu corrected

I had problems with the archiving function of blogs for early September, but as part of my continual self-education about software coding, they are all corrected now. To see the archives, click here.

Quality Quickie: NCQA's annual report

The National committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) has new report out that funnily enough contrasts strongly with the report from the Harvard academic physicians that I was somewhat cynical about in this post yesterday. NCQA's mission is to improve health...

Drug imports--This is getting a little nasty

Drug imports from Canada are now being stopped at the border. We're already had Glaxo trying to cut the Canadians off at the wholesale source (later joined by Pfizer). Now we have the FDA trying to shut down a major...

Quality Quickie: the Docs resist pay for performance

So the quality movement has been making slow strides and the first vestiges of a pay for performance system has appeared in California and has been going for a couple of years in Massachusetts. But not so fast! You may...

Stents: on the forefront of combining drugs and devices

Often those of us who've concentrated on IT, health delivery and pharmaceuticals forget the huge amounts spend on medical devices. Some of those medical devices are very expensive and in some the technological arms race is faster and has as...

Health plans spend more on IT

According to consulting firm Cap Gemini E & Y, health plans really are spending twice what they spent in 1999 on information technology. This report claims that plans are spending much more on IT in the areas of sales and...

Medicare Rx & ePrescribing

Even though everyone's back from the summer break, and even though both the Senate and the House have passed a version of the bill, it's looking less and less likely to me that we'll get a final Medicare prescription drug...

Pay or Play passes

Much to my amazement SB2, the California "play or pay" bill passed the legislature on Friday and will probably be signed by Gray Davis before the recall. However it doesn't come into effect fully until 2007, giving plenty of time...

Nano-medicine, socialized medicine and innovation.

Robert Mittman's technology series in iHealthbeat covers Nano-technology in health care. Meanwhile, Tim Oren responded to my saying that I find it strange that "sensible business people vigorously defend their right to be gouged by the current health care system...

Three strikes and you're covered

CBS 60 minutes has an amazing story about a patient given a $1 million heart transplant at Stanford--who was a prisoner. The decision to pay for the transplant was made by the state prison system because it feared being sued...

ePrescribing, PDAs and all that

I'm slowly getting back into the story around the "ePrescribing/PDA/last mile to the doctors office" issue. I'll be writing more about this later, but I've been talking around with some people in the know. From my conversations I smell a...

Quality Quickie- Blue Cross pays out

I remember mentioning in my post on pay for performance that some HMOs were paying out to medical groups based on their making certain quality indicators. Well, I may have understated that phenomenon. Blue Cross of California paid out over...

California SB 2: Socialized medicine? Hardly.

In the course of some other work, I've been catching up on Pacifica Fund VC and IFTF affiliate Tim Oren's Due Diligence column. It's a fascinating grab-bag of information about new technologies and the process of innovation, and also occassionally...

Is medical practice as clinical trial the tonic for the FDA and drug recalls?

Libertarians argue that the FDA prevents helpful drugs getting to market. Pro-regulation types tend to argue that the FDA rushes drugs through too quickly allowing too many dangerous drugs on the market. In the past few years, Phen-Fen, Rezulin and...

Quickie on Premiums

Kaiser Family Foundation and AHA's HRET have just released their annual employer benefits survey. Premiums paid by employers are up nearly 14% and employers are shifting costs onto workers. Employers are also more and more interested in providing employees with...

Jeanne Scott looks at Single payer, MSAs and what employees want: I editorialize back

I'm a little late in getting to this because I didn't get my email over labor day weekend while my site was down. Enough excuses. If you haven't been getting theJeanneScottletter, which I've told you to sign up for before,...

Premiums keep on going up

And in news just in....health care premiums will be going up by 13% in 2004, according to a Corporate Research Group survey. The "good news" is that the increase will be slightly lower than the last two years. The real...

The perils of being mid-market big Pharma

When I first got into health care a little over a decade ago, the first lesson I learned about big drug companies was that they were very profitable. The second lesson was that a huge company might have only one...

Cigna settles -- The end of "Managed Care" in sight?

Cigna has now joined Aetna in settling with the physicians who have sued it for downcoding. Essentially the suit promises that no longer will Cigna automatically downcode claims from providers, and will go as far as to allow "questions of...

Drug companies political contributions in the limelight

The New York Times has a long and generally factual article about the impact of contributions from drug companies in the 2000 and 2002 elections, and it's relation to the Medicare prescription drug coverage bills that are now in conference...

WebMD - An old nugget gives indigestion

WebMD was and remains the most remarkable company of the eHealth era. It was remarkable for the incredible feeding frenzy it set off in the eHealth world when Healtheon bought the then privately held WebMD in 1999, making Jeff Arnold...

Caremark/AdvancePCS Follow up

Today's New York Times confirms what I said yesterday. Caremark is paying a bit too much for AdvancePCS, but is doing so to get into the Medicare scrum as in the NYT's words "large drug benefit managers jockey for position...

I'm back alive online

OK. My site is up and hopefully you are reading this by getting here via matthewholt.net or via thehealthcareblog.com, (or via .org and .net both of which get you here. (I describe the experience later when I've calmed down a...

PBMs again -- Caremark buys AdvancePCS

For serveral weeks the odd rumor that PBM Caremark was going to buy AdvancePCS showed up in the Yahoo ADVP message board. While you shouldn't usually trust what those boards say, this time they were right. Caremark announced a roughly...

Biotech re-emerges?

Welcome back from the Labor day break. I'm still working on re-establishing my site, so please keep your browser pointed at thehealthcareblog.com and in the meantime I'll keep posting! When it's safe to go back to matthewholt.net I'll let you...