The Health Care Blog

POLICY: Health care reform competition

Do you know the secret for saving the health care system? Well, the first healthcare reform competition is still on. If you haven't had a chance to submit yet, there's still time to get your entry in. Go on. Dazzle...

PHARMA: Cheerleaders and sex-symbols

Talk about slightly unfortunate timing. Just one day after the New York Times has an article about how pharma companies go about recruiting cheerleaders as detail babes reps, Bayer announces that it's hiring the ex-Ms Mick Jagger, and very leggy...

BLOGS: Grand Rounds

Graham does a nice job on Grand Rounds. I could have sworn I sent in my entry earlier last week, but a check of my “sent emails” just goes to prove that these days my mind files the “thinks I...

TECH: New health care IT blog nexus!

Just in case you don’t think that THCB is enough, Shahid Shah who among other things runs The Healthcare IT Guy blog, has put together a page with many if not all of the health care IT related blogs on...

TECH: iPods and Health Care

The ever wonderful Jane Sarasohn Kahn has a new commentary up at iHealthbeat on iPods and Health Care. It’s really more about how consumers are using new media in general in health care rather than podcasting per se, but it’s...

TECH: More PHR struggles

I'm talking at a conference at the end of the week about consumer health records. Given that you all by now know the history of how the company I was with that sold consumer health records to health plans was...

POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: Obvious, but public and private taxes still cost money

Via Ezra, Krugman, and Bradford Plumer there are some interesting numbers showing that the private welfare state (i.e. pensions, health benefits, etc provided by corporations) in the US added to the public welfare state which exists here but is more...

POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: A European conservative complains, but groks the problem

This is pretty interesting. Paul Belien, a Belgian conservative is complaining about governments in Europe cutting spending on health care, with the results that more expensive technologies are withheld from the elderly (like his 90 year old uncle). He thinks...

BLOGS: Turkey day

Happy Thanksgiving. See you here Monday

THCB: Updating ...

A little light blog keeping to do today. If you haven't listened to one of the podcasts, the podcast archive is now up and running. If you have yet to subscribe to the podcast feed - you can go here...

POLICY: Employment-based healthcare, more of the same uneven erosion

There are two ways employers get out of providing health care. They can stop providing it (and plenty of data shows that they are doing just that) and they can also pass more of the cost onto their employees. That...

Policy: What is a transplant worth? By John Pluenneke

Nearly a hundred thousand Americans are on waiting lists hoping for organ transplants. Thousands will die this year alone. Should a free market be allowed to develop to allow those who can afford to do so to purchase the liver...

PHARMA: Pain Therapeutics causes yet more headaches

Those of you hanging out here for a while know that I'm a long term holder of Pain Therapeutics stock. The pitch is that it has three drugs in phase III trials, one for pain, one for IBS and one...

POLICY: CHCF report on Safety Net Clinics

Given that the community clinics are apparently our brave leader's only thoughts about how to provide care for the poor in America, it's pretty timely that a new California Health Care Foundation study is out giving a primer on safety...

PHARMA/POLICY/POLITICS: Medicare Part D--A mess that will need fixing when the grown-ups get back into power

Last week the most convoluted program in the history of Medicare began. I've heard comments from friends, neighbors and people in the press saying that they can't make heads or tails of the new drug benefit. The Washington Post piled...

TECH: The evolution of wireless in hospitals

Now that cell phones and Wi-fi have proven to be safe and essential for health care facilities, there's a race on to get signals into those buildings. This is proving to have some interesting possibilities, but is also bringing some...

FDA examining Oseltamivir risks by John Pluenneke

If you read FierceHealthcare, you had advance warning of this one on Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday afternoon that the Food and Drug Administration is probing as many as 12 deaths it believes may be linked to oseltamivir...

PHARMA/POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: Not all the wingnuts are in the US

Australia had some great news yesterday as the national team qualified for the soccer world cup, even though it's only the 4th most popular team sport with the word "football" in the title in the country. But there was also...

POLICY: Yet more Dartmouth proof about doing too much

We’re almost at the point that you know exactly what any study from the Dartmouth group is going to find before it’s published. Following the assessment last year that showed that the nations “Top 100” hospitals show a wide variety...

BLOGS: FierceHealthcare, free and daily

Just in case you’re here from the WSJ for the first time, I also write a newsletter digest called FierceHealthcare which goes out daily and summarizes all you need to know about health care news. It’s news (albeit with context)...

PHYSICIANS: One doc's look at his own care patterns

File this in the cleaning up my queue category, but there’s a pretty good article in last weeks NEJM about how a doctor judges himself. I’d submit that apart from baseball players, and call center customer service rep, most of...

BLOGS/POLICY: Health Reform competition still on

Just another reminder…. Please don't forget to enter your solutions for the health reform compeition that Eric Novack and I are running, into this post. Only 250 words to save the American health care system? You can do that, go...

BLOGS: Ego surfing..

So the WSJ picks today, when I'm unable to get to post much, to send gads of people to THCB. Welcome, welcome, and please feel free to dig around in the categories to zero in on what you're interested in....

TECH: Cerner stock keeps going up

Cerner’s stock price is up another 5% today. It’s P/E is nearing 45. And this is for a company that basically sells more services (i.e. consulting) than software. No doubt that the re-architecting of their technology back in the last...

POLICY: Jamie Robinson on Managed Consumerism--innovative but missing the bigger picture.

Jamie Robinson is one of the best and brightest of the “younger” crop of health economists in America, and certainly has his ear to the ground of what’s going on in American health care in a way that few others...

PHARMA/POLICY: GAO confirms the corruption of science forced on the FDA

Just in case there was any doubt that the White House’s filthy fingerprints were all over the Plan B non-decision, the Congressional GAO is out with a report that call the FDA's Plan B decision process 'unusual'. And of course...

BLOGS: Typepad apologises for hassles

So I managed to lose some work because of Typepad’s system problems last week. They have apologized and offered all their users a free month/fortnight/45 days rebate. Very nice of them. I also lost some work (hence no long post...

POLICY/POLITICS: Health Reform may be back on the national agenda

Here's my editorial from FierceHealthcare this morning. This week may or may not have been a political harbinger for the coming years. Following a disastrous year for the Administration, Democrats have been claiming victory following wins in Virginia, New Jersey...

POLICY: Did you need more evidence that being poor and sick is bad for your financial health?

No, you've seen plenty including what's being described in various places as my "smackdown" of Medpundit last week. but in case you weren't quite satisfied, another liberal bleeding heart group (reported by capitalist tools Forbes of all people) has found...

PBMs: The future of PBMs--a work in progress

There's an interesting article in AISHealth.com's Business News of the Week called Why the Plans of a Major Drug Purchasing Coalition Did Not Work. The quick story is that a group of employers got together in late 2004 and made...

PHARMA/PHYSICIANS/POLICY: Oncologists getting paid for reporting data they should report anyway, by Gregory D. Pawelski

Congress has authorized the payment for oncologists reporting whether their treatment adheres to guidelines. Greg Pawelski, who follows the oncology market very carefully, was not too impressed. When Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley found out that the value of...

BLOGS: Open thread

For those of you wanting to go on at more than 250 words about the health policy competition, how I'm an unfair censor or anything else that takes your fancy. Post your coments in this thread. (I can't easily move...

PHARMA/POLICY/POLITICS: Slick Willie syphons off big Pharma

Today is waste of money election day in California, brought to you mostly by the soon-to-be terminated Governor Arnold. But there are two other props on the ballot on which PhRMA has dropped more than $80 million to muddy the...

PHARMA: How to be a great pharma salesman and do no work

Or something like that, as explained to Pharmaceutical Executive by Jamie Reidy. I would have bought his book Hard Sell and read it, but of course I'm just too lazy,

BLOGS: Grand Rounds

...is up over at MSSP Nexus Blog, and it features a well-known Starship doctor.

POLICY: First Healthcare Reform Competition

As those of you who've been deep in this post know, Eric Novack has been looking for answers to the healthcare reform debate and he suggested that we have a competition among THCB readers to come up with a decent...

PHARMA: Jim Edward's on big Pharma's need to communicate about risks

Brandweek's Jim Edwards has a very sensible opinion piece (i.e. one I agree with) suggesting that big Pharma needs to start treating consumers like adults and tell them about the risks as well as the benefits of their products. I've...

POLICY: Wal-Mart Seeks Unbiased Research -- and Gets It

OK. This is a little bizarre. Wal-Mart is setting up a political war-room now that its opponents have a new documentary to rally around which captures several of its former managers on film discussing how criminal acts (albeit minor ones)...

INTERNATIONAL/POLICY: Sick patients in six countries

No reader of THCB will be surprised that the cross-national series which the Commonwealth Fund has sponsored for several years now (and for which my old colleague and friend at Harris, Kinga Zapert has been running the surveys) continues to...

PHARMA: More from James Gardner on the DTC hearings

Here's more from James Gardner of One to One Interactive on the FDA Hearings on DTC Advertising. Welcome back for the second of two postings I’ll be making about the FDA’s public hearings on direct-to-consumer (DTC) promotion of regulated medical...

POLICY: Single payer advocate debate wing-nut

So in the Fresno Bee a single payer advocate has a sensible piece on why California should adopt single payer. I don't agree -- I think we should have a multiple-payer system, with lots of single-payer look alike provisions, but...

POLICY/BLOGS: More slack crap from Medpundit exposes the big conservative morality lie

Late last month the NY Times had a pretty horrendous article about a family that was losing its house because it couldn't pay for all the co-pays and co-insurance for its sick son's care. I've just got round to catching...

POLICY: A tax proposal for fairness, but it'll never make it, WITH UPDATE

Finally a tax proposal I approve of (even though it would hurt me personally). There's a commission that wants to lower the limit on mortgage tax deductions. But of course every elected official in California and New York is freaking...

QUALITY/TECH: Another medical error in the headlines

Chemotherapy remains a very dangerous business. Ten years after Betsy Lehman's death jump-started the patient safety movement, here's another death -- this time from the wrong drug used. Anyone know what (if any) EMAR system Kaiser is running in Santa...

PHARMA: What next for DTC regulation? by James Gardner

Those of you following along at home know that big Pharma is trying to get ahead of a suddenly hostile Congress (including Bill Frist turning on them) on the subject of DTC advertising. This week they're holding hearings on direct-to-consumer...

POLICY: The uninsured, health care costs, and the insurance industry's vacuous response

It won't surprise regular readers at THCB but there are a lot of uninsured people in this country, and the problem is getting worse. Why? Well some bright wonks (John Holahan and Allison Cook at the generally liberal Urban Institute)...

QUALITY/POLICY: Vince Kuraitis on Medicare DM

On Friday, November 4th, 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM Pacific (1:00 PM - 1:45 PM Eastern), Vince Kuraitis, Principal. Better Health Technologies and a leading Disease Management guru will be doing an audioconference of this presentation as part of Managed...

BLOGS: Typepad apparently sucks

Typepad apparently has decided to start being unable to handle its traffic, or something. Anyway it just started eating posts, including a long one I just wrote. I hit save. It gave me an error message and a blank slate,...

BLOGS: Managed Care Matters is one year old

Joe Paduda's Managed Care Matters blog is one year old. If you don't know it, Joe has short punchy articles on a range of subjects surrounding managed care, insurance and workers comp and it's well worth checking it out.