The Health Care Blog

INTERNATIONAL: US primary care looks poor in comparison to other nations

Not two weeks ago Bush yet again trotted his dad's old line about the American health care system being the best in the world. A little earlier this fall Robert Centor at DB's Medical Rants said that primary care in...

BLOGS: Self-referential ego-surfing

I missed this when it came out, but THCB gets a little fame in Pharmaceutical Executive this past month. I'm grateful for the publicity, but the article missed out on mentioning Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline and no one who...

POLICY: One more time around on the VA issue, by Dave Moskowitz

This may be the last word for now on the idea of using the VA for the uninsured, raised by Dave Moskowitz last week. Let me try to put this in a little context. We're not likely to have a...

POLITICS: My (almost) last word on Prop 72

I'm much more disgusted with both sides on the prop 72 debate than I was before this past week. I went to a "debate" on it at the Commonweatlh Club on Monday and then heard (and phoned into) an NPR...

POLICY: Interesting book out on Soc Sec, Titles 18 & 19

Liberal historian Mark Santow has written a book about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid with his fiscal conservative dad, Leonard. I haven't got through much of it, and it's a 100 pager, not a 3 pager, but well worth looking...

TECHNOLOGY: Stent Wars

The NY Times looks at the ongoing battle between J&J's Cordis and Boston Scientific's drug-eluting stents. Since Boston Sci has recovered from its recall problems over the summer it has been really cranking out the numbers. It's Taxus stent sold...

TECHNOLOGY: Social networking meets health care

Those of you who've been paying attention may note that there's a mini-boomlet going on again in Silicon Valley, and those of you clever enough to have bought Google stock at its IPO, or have been sleeping with the founders...

POLICY: Will infrastructure issues scuttle the VA idea?

Dave Moskowitz's idea of using the VA as a public provision system to cover the uninsured has got a little bit of feedback. While some of you wonks might be thinking as I do that the VA would be overwhelmed...

INTERNATIONAL/PHYSICIANS: American doctors running off -- to the UK!?

So I spent most of last week at two different conferences. One in Vegas was sponsored by a subsidiary of SAS Institute, Better Management, and was mostly about the application of data analysis to health care process redesign. The other...

PHARMA/POLICY: A research and policy institute for the "third way"

I've been working behind the scenes with a very talented group led by Dave Gershon, an over-qualified MD/JD who's spent time on Wall Street. Dave has putting together an organization called The National Institute for Pharmaco-Economics & Healthcare Policy. The...

POLICY: The VA as a solution for the uninsured, by Dave Moskowitz

Today there's a new contributor to THCB. Dave Moskowitz runs a genome company that claims that judicious use of ACE inhibitors can reduce the prevalence of heart disease and cancers. But those of you interested in that must navigate over...

POLITICS: Dateline Nevada

So I'm in Vegas, which is in Nevada, and I'm getting a flavor of what a "swing state" means and where all the billion dollars (mostly raised from California & New York) has gone. Every single commercial is about the...

POLICY: Uwe's words of wisdom

In case you missed it at Ross' site, here' Uwe Reinhardt's guide for journalists ot the health care debate. Brilliant, and rather tragic. More at his site.

PHARMA: The New Yorker, Industry Veteran and Atlas on pharma pricing and where the industry goes next.

There's a pretty long article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker called High Prices in which he essentially places much of the blame for big pharma's current state on the other actors in the system being too dumb to...

HEALTH PLANS: Did Eliot Spitzer short the health plan index?

It seems like only yesterday I was posting about how much money health plans were making, and that only I and Don Johnson thought they were overvalued. Well not for any reason that I or Don gave, but all the...

POLITICS: "Movable" voters in the swing states care about health care

A fascinating 2 pager from the kaiser Family Foundation looks at opinion polls in three swing states, Iowa, Ohio and Minesotta. There are some really amazing things in here: A poll conducted October 8-11, 2004 by Market Shares Corp. for...

BLOGS: A Kosalanche hits THCB

Ahh, the power of the superblogs. A tiny reference to THCB in a posting by MeteorBlades, a regular on the Dem friendly Daily Kos blog made yesterday my most popular day ever at THCB. And the article by MeteorBlades on...

POLICY: Medicare and admin costs, again.

In today's post I risk upsetting The Veteran even more, by featuring a new comment from Joe Crea, a doc who's run off to academia and so doesn't need to care what anyone thinks of him! Joe is peeved at...

PHARMA: Doctor says drug firms ghost write medical articles, with UPDATE from The Industry Veteran

Given the controversy over Vioxx, big Pharma's PR and The Lancet's fight with Crestor last year, this headline from a British government enquiry is pretty explosive stuff. Doctor says drug firms ghost write medical articles. And the articles that are...

POLICY: Why dishonesty rules in our health care "debate"

Bush has certainly been attacking Kerry on his health care program. Jonathan Cohn is an editor at the New Republic who specializes in health care and is currently a Kaiser Family Foundation media fellow. For those of you who don't...

POLICY/PHARMA: Ross on the flu vaccine

Ross at the The Public Health Press has a just excellent summation of the flu vaccine issue, in the context of the two rather odd replies from Bush and Kerry to that question in last night's debate.

POLICY: An economist's forecasts Prop 72's impact, so it's incomplete and lacks common sense, with UPDATE

Harvard economist Anna Sinaiko has an article in Health Affiars suggesting that the SB 2 (or Prop 72) "pay or play" law will cause unemployment and reduced wages for those Californians it covers should it pass. Her analysis is manna...

TECHNOLOGY: Huge report on mobile solutions from BCC Consulting

There is a new and enormous report out, at a very attractive price, from BCC Consuting. It's called Going Mobile: Choosing the Right Inpatient Solution. Be warned that this is a huge reference work of about 200 pages, not a...

PHARMA: Big pharma spends more on dividends than research? with UPDATE

This is brutal, but USA Today reports that equity analyst David Peterson from Bank of America Securities has a report out suggesting not that pharma spends more on marketing and gets more in profits than it spends on R&D, but...

POLICY: Of unbiased Republicans, Thorpe, Kerry and uninsured kids, with UPDATE

Ken Thorpe writes in the NEJM on the uninsured. He's been in the Clinton Administration, and he's the author of the study that says the Kerry plan's cost will be in the $650 billion range rather than the AEI's $1.5...

PHARMA: The Industry Veteran takes THCB to task for its wishy-washy moderation

I thought that my HSA post from Friday might stir one of my noted contributors into action. Not so; instead The Industry Veteran thinks that in a recent post where I've been a little critical of Marcia Angell, I've misinterpreted...

POLICY: No on Prop. 72 ad busted for faking it

Proposition 72 is a referendum on the California pay or play bill that passed in the waning days of Gray Davis ill fate-second term before the Governator swept all before him a year ago. The Yes on 72 bill has...

POLICY: HSAs Redux, and "A short response on a short bit of logic"

A couple of days back in a piece on HSAs I challenged someone, anyone to speak up for HSAs against this criticism from Don McCanne. While I'm not a straight single payer advocate like Don, we both believe in one...

QUALITY: Wennberg's Dartmouth team shows enormous variation even in the "best hospitals"

More just astonishing research from Wennberg and his team. The latest study shows that whatever the US News and World Report's ranking of a hospital, some top centers do lots more to a patient close to the end of life...

PHARMA: Marcia Angell rips big Pharma a new one

So Marcia Angell's talk at the commonwealth Club was all that I expected. She is witty and charming and she really laid into big Pharma. Big pharma to her has no redeeming qualities. Everything they do is wrong and all...

PHARMA FUNNY: Angry Actresses march on Washington over Botox rationing

It's all true and HHS Secretary Thompson has appealed to the general public not to take a Botox shot away from someone with a film role or major awards cermony coming up.

TECHNOLOGY: Very short memories in the PHR space

REDMedic is a start-up building a personal health record prodcut aimed directly at end-user consumers. Their wrinkle in the space is that people can take a key-fob or card with them so that if they get into an accident an...

HOSPITALS: A southern hospitals CEO roundtable, with UPDATE

"Tennessee, Tennessee, there ain't no place I'd rather be" sang the Greatful Dead back in the day. Why that bunch of stoned hippies wanted to go 1,500 miles away from the good stuff from Humboldt I'll never know, but Knoxville,...

HEALTH PLANS: Destiny Health's survey says 8 out of 10 Health Plan CEOs said their cats customers preferred it

Just in case you thought I only publicized the potential problems with HSAs, there are some people in America happy to see them. Destiny Health, which is now offering its consumer services via other health plans has put together a...

PHARMA: Reimportation, corporate villains and the likely outcomes

So it's become apparent to THCB readers and anyone else following the reimportation issue that Pharma is, as the Christian Science Monitor puts it, the new corporate villain. And it isn't playing its hand very well. The one person in...

POLITICS: Real survey companies know that it's a tie

So after the debate on Thursday, which didn't feature health care, it looks like the Presidential election is back in a tie. Newsweek has Princeton Survey Research's post-debate poll with Kerry leaving 47-45%, with a 4% margin of error. When...

PHARMA: Everything you ever wanted to know about Vioxx but were too afraid to ask

So it may be that the doyen of American drug companies when I entered the business may be falling into a death spiral. Merck's withdrawal of Vioxx from the market combined with its major statin Zocor going off patent in...