The Health Care Blog

HOSPITALS: Pity poor ex-Tenet CEO Barbakow

Jeff Barbakow was the CEO in charge of Tenet at the time of their stock collapse following all the goings-on at their Redding, CA, facility and elsewhere. Although he cashed out nearly $111m in Tenet stock a few months before...

PHARMA: The Industry Veteran and friends blame (mostly) the doctors

So following Sunday's NY Times article on bribes being paid for prescribing and my comments yesterday, the Industry Veteran let me in on some email exchanges going on round his electronic watercooler. You'll note that he and his colleagues do...

INTERNATIONAL: Canada's Liberal Party Loses Majority

So after all the fuss about Canada possibly changing political horses, the election result shows that the Liberal Party got much more of the vote (37%) than the conservatives (29%). Due to the way Canada's parliamentary system works (and because...

PHARMA: Hands - cookie jar - once more a connection

If you missed this over the weekend, the New York Times reports on yet another example of very dubious marketing practices by certain pharma manufacturers. This time the charges are that Schering (more or less) paid doctors to prescribe drugs....

INDUSTRY: JSK on transparency in health care

Just a quick one for today. Go read Jane Sarasohn Kahn's article on "transparency" in her iHealthbeat column. Then consider if the recent Supreme Court decision not allowing health plans to be sued by their members increases or decreases their...

PHARMA: Big pharma's reputation continues to sink, and managed care stays low

Thank God for the tobacco and oil companies for without them the health care industry's reputation would be bottom of the heap. Harris Interactive is out with its latest scores on reputations and the pharma industry continues its fall from...

PBMs: Medco layoffs

A while back Medco lost the FEBHP contract to Caremark. Now TheStreet.com reports that Medco is laying off some 7% of its workforce. And its stock has started to rally somewhat on the news. THCB readers will know that I've...

HEALTH PLANS: Jones the Policy Wonk on the Supremes decision in favor of HMOs

On Monday the Supreme Court handed down a decision that may at first glance appear more relevant to the bad old days of managed care. In a decision authored by Clarence Thomas, who's never seen an old irrelevant law he...

POLICY: Perpetual war hits military families hard

It's well worth looking at this commentary from Kaiser Family Foundation's Drew Altman, and preeminent health care policy expert Bob Blendon at Harvard. They recently surveyed military families about the costs of the extended tours of duty being forced upon...

TECHNOLOGY: ePrescribing facing tough going

I'm on the road this week so things might be a little backed up here at THCB. So please excuse the unusual publishing schedule, but as always you get what you pay for! Today I wanted to point you at...

HEALTH PLANS: More tittle-tattle about WellPoint

Just to add onto all the fuss about Wellpoint's merger with Anthem, California's biggest newspaper The LA Times has a none too glowing analysis of the motives behind the merger. The point it hints at but doesn't really follow through...

PHARMA: Statin redux as FDA issues new advisory for Crestor

(Hat-tip to Sydney at Medpundit for this one). The FDA late last week issued a new advisory for Crestor, Astra-Zeneca's blockbuster statin. THCB readers not suffering from medium term memory loss might remember a series of articles from various interested...

POLICY: Another view on the uninsured numbers tells the same story

FamiliesUSA, a pressure group that was deeply connected to the Clinton health plan back in the 1992-4 period, has produced a new report about the uninsurance numbers. Their analysis of the CPS data shows that over the course of a...

TECHNOLOGY: How much is really being spent on IT?

A recent spate of studies is out on health care IT spending. iHealthbeat had an article about Forrester Research's report on health care IT spending, which they think will be $61 billion in 2004. Their estimate is that 3.7% of...

PHARMA/TECHNOLOGY: Picking your statin to match your genotype

It's for long been a somewhat dirty little secret of the pharma world that not all drugs work for not all patients. That goes for statins too, despite the best medical advice saying that we should all be on them....

HOSPITALS: Capital issues for hospitals

The NY Times has an article suggesting that hospitals may soon have less ability to invest in capital projects than they have had in the last few years. The blame is put mostly on higher interest rates. I'm a little...

HOSPITALS: Tenet borrows another $500 million

Speaking of hospital systems accessing capital, after the market close Tuesday Tenet borrowed another chunk of cash, about $550m worth and rolled over some of its shorter-term debt to longer-term notes. It now has about $1.1 billion cash available, but...

HEALTH PLANS: Calpers to vote against Anthem-WellPoint merger

In a quick update to a story I commented on last week, the payout to Wellpoint execs has got the big Kahuna of all shareholders, CalPERS (the California State employees' pension system), in a tizzy. Calpers now plans to vote...

TECHNOLOGY: Open Source EMRs, the AAFP, and CMS grants gone awry? (with apologies to George Lucas)

Following a Matt Quinn story in THCB last month, Mark Spohr, MD, has written to me about the AAFP and its grant from CMS to further the use of EMRs in family practice. This topic is a little obscure but...

QUALITY: The "White" Wall of Silence, by MATT QUINN

In Washington state a doctor wants a fellow doctor suspended over malpractice testimony. Matt Quinn (again endearing himself to my physician readers, and now getting THCB on the California Correctional Officers Association hit list too) comments: More intra-physician contentiousness regarding...

HOSPITALS: Can Tenet really afford $1 billion to settle?

Those dumb speculators who gave up on Tenet when its stock fell to $9, should have hung on. In the past week it's been up as high as $13. However, that may all change with the reports that Tenet is...

PHARMA/POLICY: Kaiser FF reports on Seniors views on the Medicare bill

In a vain attempt to clear THCB's backlog -- I tend to save every interesting story and lately there have been too many -- I'm just posting a quick link to the Kaiser Family Foundation's recent focus groups with Medicare...

POLICY: Craziness and deception from the College of Pediatricians

So the American College of Pediatricians has come out in unanimous favor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. In their terms this is based on "the firm knowledge that the basic father-mother family unit, within marriage, is the...

PHARMA: A quick update on the GSK Paxil probe, by The Industry Veteran

The Industry Veteran has a quick contribution to the Paxil story, gathered from the home town press of GSK. The London press claims that the British Healthcare Regulatory Agency is too cozy with GSK and that it took an outsider...

HEALTH PLANS: CDHPs saving money! Really? by MATT QUINN

The recent report from INSIDE CONSUMER-DIRECTED CARE cites an impressive 12.7% drop in PMPM medical claim costs in St. Luke's Hospital's first year of implementing a consumer directed health plan (CDH) for its employees. This seems especially impressive in a...

TECHNOLOGY: The state of play at America's leading health systems

More musings from the Healthtech meeting. Given that this is a somewhat private meeting, and I'm an invited guest, I'm not going to name names, but suffice it to say that the health systems here include many of the largest...

TECHNOLOGY/QUALITY: The Digital Delivery System

Yesterday I was at Healthtech's conference on The Digital Delivery System. Healthtech is a non-profit research consulting group which conducts research on information and medical technologies, and how their emergence and use will impact hospital systems. Healthtech is led by...

HOSPITALS: CalPERS v Sutter latest

More on the ongoing CalPERS v Sutter dispute. Sutter says that its charges are reasonable but CalPERS claims that it is being charged up to 82% more than in other hospitals in the same area. Apparantly the public sector unions...

HEALTH PLANS: Wellpoint pay-out word is out, and the PR is not good, with UPDATE

So as a consequence of the Wellpoint/Anthem merger some two hundred plus top execs are going to get payouts that total between $150m and $350m, depending on whether or not they are kept on for three years by the new...

POLICY/SYSTEM: Costs increases slowing slightly

The Center for Health System Change is out with its assessment of cost increases for 2003. And believe it or not, they say costs increases are slowing, down to a mere 7.9% from 9.5% in 2002 and 10% in 2001....

HOSPITALS/POLICY: For-profits cost more, but that's not the point!

In a publication that (hat-tip to Jacob at Family Medicine Notes who is also to be congratulated on the excellent upgrade to Medlogs) comes from the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association a meta-analysis confirms that in the US for-profit...

BLOGNOTES: Jeanne Scott's website coming to life, and Bloglet

The wonderful Jeanne Scott of TheJeanneScottLetter is getting her newsletters back up. The most recent two are up on her site health-politics.com and she promises that the rest will follow. So go read! And subscribe if you haven't already by...

INTERNATIONAL: Tight elections and the Canada/US comparison

Up north they are having an election in the land where they no longer ever win the Stanley Cup, (although it should be noted that like the "Swiss" who won the Americas Cup over the New Zealanders mostly because the...

QUALITY: More evidence on the scantity of EBM

In this post, a little more from last week's IFTF meeting. The variation in practice of evidence-based medicine was described in a speech by Bern Shen, as one of the major "impediments" to health and healthcare. THCB readers, MedRants readers...

PHARMA: The New York Times opinion on GSK and Spitzer

I've refrained from getting too much into the Spitzer versus Glaxo legal shenanigans over Paxil, and whether results were withheld deliberately or not. However, suffice it to say that yet again Pharma's PR is not exactly going to be helping...

TECHNOLOGY: Biomimetics

Robert Mittman has another iHealthbeat article out in his technology Foresight Series. This one is on the connection between nature and human technology, known as Biomimitecs. Well worth a read.

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS: What's the end game of all these premium rises?

I spent the last couple of days at an IFTF conference which looked at impediments to improving health and creating a better health care system--a small topic as you may have guessed. I'll report a little more about the conference...

TECHNOLOGY: Has the time come for low-cost, standardized EMRs? by Matt Quinn

Not long ago, I postulated about the idea of giving Don Berwick the $100M the federal government has set aside for healthcare IT to develop an open source enterprise EMR system. It seems that CMS is going down that road...

TECHNOLOGY: WebMD probs continue

I've blogged over time about WedMD's role as a business (three variant parts plus a plastics company looking in vain for synergies) and it's role as a potential analytics player. However, in its role as a claims transaction clearinghouse and...

PHARMA: Overdosing on ED

In case you were worried that Pfizer was losing some lead from its pencil--and there have been some rumors about new scripts for Levitra and Cialis doing pretty well-- MedAdNews reports that apparently Viagra is staring down its rivals. Of...

PHARMA: The progress of reimportation, by The Industry Veteran

It looks like the Senate is going to pass the re-importation bill and then try to force the House to come on board. If, as I've been saying for a while, the Republicans are going to cave on this and...

POLICY: The war on pain doctors

Like Robert Centor at MedRants, Chris Rangel MD and many, many others I'm a strong opponent of the War on Drugs, but I rarely bring that up in THCB. That's because the Drug War is largely a political, social and...

POLICY: A rural California MD comments on the CHCF studies

Leonard Soloniuk, MD, wrote in to THCB to comment on my post on Frday linking the care for Medicaid and uninsured patients in California with the Canadian experience. A post in which I was a little shrill about certain American...