The Health Care Blog

QUALITY/POLICY: P4P get official in Businessweek, no less

So in a remarkable bit of futurism, only 8 years after Greg Schmid invented the concept at IFTF (well, we end up calling it performance-based reimbursement, but it's the same thing as P4P), Businessweek has noticed and Pay for Performance...

OFF TOPIC: Zola retires

The greatest Chelsea player ever, and one of greatest gentleman in world football, retired yesterday. Thanks, Gianfranco.

PHARMA/POLICY: More on Plan B and its relationship to the overall chaos at the FDA

A little more about my FDA article from Monday.... Prospect/Nation journalist Ayelish McGarvey, who wrote the article about David Hager, and knows way more about Plan B than I'd ever want to, says that I (and by implication Robert Steeves...

POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: The Weekly Standard on moron support

In an article called Socialized Medicine on Life Support, there is just yet more rubbish from a libertarian doctor form a libertarian "think-tank" writing in a conservative weekly. For chrisssakes, Canada doesn't even have "Socialized Medicine" -- defined as the...

INDUSTRY: Scrushy verdict is in--He walks

So after about 15 years of deliberation, the biggest fraud in the history of health care is coming to its zenith. The news is that the jury has reached a verdict in Scrushy trial. Now we'll see if all that...

POLICY/QUALITY: The Nursing Shortage -- It's real

Over at Code: the WebSocket Alwin has a really great article about the nursing shortage called A hard rain is gonna fall. I think he's right and that after we've emptied every third world nation of their meagre nursing supply,...

PHARMA/POLICY/POLITICS: The FDA remains in tatters

It's time to dip into the murky waters of the FDA once more. This is a classic tale of politics intruding into an agency that should have science as its prime motivator. Here's the story summarized so far. The FDA...

TECH: Conversation with Girish Kumar, eClinicalWorks

I wrote a brief editorial in THCB and also on FierceHealthcare last week, suggesting that the problem with IT in the US wasn't so much a lack of interoperability as it was a lack of use of IT in the...

POLICY: Why health care costs so much

This one is the cross-post from Ezra's blog yesterday. I was going to do something different last night, but the wind was right and so I went paragliding instead! And it was great! I will have more on the FDA...

BLOGS: Guesting

I'm guesting over at young UCLA punk Ezra Klein's very interesting political site this week so go there to take a look at this piece I wrote on why health care costs so much.

HEALTH PLANS: The Gadfly seems to have caused Kaiser real trouble

So the Gadfly has really had an effect, and in some ways so has THCB. But I'm not sure it's a good one. Yesterday for the breach of patient confidentiality that was fairly exhaustively documented on THCB and elsewhere, the...

POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: More rubbish being talked about single payer and Canada by major newspaper columnist

I had hoped that when the Boston Globe gave Jeff Jacoby a chance to rant about Canada and single payer, and THCB was able to call bullshit, that I wouldn't have to repeat myself quite so soon. But to no...

INTERNATIONAL: The Future of Europe, Seen from a Sickbed

Timothy Garton Ash is a veteran British journalist, sort of from the Blairite "Third Way" school. He has lectured Bush on foreign policy and has been an influential writer about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. So his thoughts...

HEALTH PLANS: Looks like Empire has caved

So judging from the comments in the post on this subject below, it looks like Empire BCBS has decided that the headache of not paying for the young teenager's surgery exceeds that of appearing on CNN in a negative light....

TECH: Interoperability/schminteroperability

This week the Clinton/Frist (or should it be Frist/Clinton) legislation got on breakfast time TV, and Brailer's office announced that it was going to be starting the first few pilots towards interoperability with some $60m available. A more ambitious $4bn...

POLICY: Now let's remember a few basic things about Medicare, single payer, vouchers et al, with brief UPDATE

Well either the doppelgangers are firing off or a few people have been reading this blog or the Jungian collective unconscious is working. In any event several of the issues about single payer versus vouchers that have been raised here...

HEALTH PLANS: Patient activism using the web

So I was sent an appeal by a grandmother upset that her grand-son was denied surgery by his insurer for what looks to be a pretty unpleasant condition, called Pectus Excavatum. She has taken the campaign to the web. I...

POLICY: Another dribble on the single payer versus voucher issue

There's an interesting set of six letters about Krugman's article in the NY Times. One of the letters is way off base, suggesting that Medicare limits what doctors can and can't do. Well I suppose compared to a cash paying...

POLICY: Single payer versus vouchers: somewhat missing the point

In an op-ed called One Nation Uninsured Paul Krugman has given intellectual solace to all the single payer advocates out there and in his terms defined the serious argument in health poicy as being "between those who believe that the...

HEALTH PLANS: Perhaps you shouldn't click on every Google Ad, with UPDATE on underinsurance

As you may or may not have noticed, in a (mostly failing) attempt to see whether I can make any money back off this blog, I've been running Google Adsense down on the left column. A certain commenter, let's call...

QUALITY: Want to avoid medical errors? Pick a profitable hospital

Just found this gem. Apparently an AHRQ study looked at the rate of medical errors in Florida hospitals and discovered that the more profitable hospitals (situated in general in areas where there were wealthier patients of course) had fewer medical...

QUALITY/TECH: CHCF on Chronic Disease Care

I'll review this in a little bit (getting a bit of a slow start this AM), but I wanted THCB readers to know that California Healthcare Foundation has published some more excellent studies with very practical applications. These ones focus...

POLICY: PRI has a blog, almost.

Sometimes you just wonder how these press release lists get put together. The Pacific Research Institute, which with its fellow traveler organization the Fraser Institute, has been issuing nutty and just plain wrong "research" about Canadian health care for years,...

POLICY: Fuchs and Emanuel on vouchers

In an article called "Solved!" Vic Fuchs (and new-ish partner) Ezekiel Emanuel go into much more detail about their plan for creating a VAT-funded voucher system for health care. I'm moderately in favor of vouchers for health care and education...

TECH: Firefox effed up?

Is it just me or is the latest release of Firefox 1.0.4 a disaster? Ever since I downloaded it, Firefox has been crawling compared to IE--literally taking 10 times as long to download a web site. So much so that...

PHARMA: A start-up data success? IMS Health buys PharMetrics

This one may be a little too inside baseball for some of you, so don't be afraid to skip it. However, if you care about pharma marketing, read on. Yesterday IMS Health said it was buying PharMetrics. PharMetrics is a...

PHARMA: Is Pfizer's Black Knight on the way out?

So the slow burn of Peter Rost's time at Pfizer appears to be picking up. The NY Times reports that he's essentially been comparing him with the Black Knight (in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) in not noticing how...

BLOGS/TECH: THCB week off over, more or less

Your host took a (he believes) well-earned break in Europe last week following some work over there (and no it wasn't for the NHS). I'm actually still there (here?) having randomly found wi-fi in a wi-fi less world before my...