The Health Care Blog

POLICY: Medical bankruptcy podcast

This is a podcast that I've done with Michael Millenson who deigns to attack David Himmelstein's hallowed article on medical bankruptcy. We had a good time in this interview, even though I think Michael's picked the wrong target, and he's...

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS: The sensible way out for the non-profit plans

Ken Melani, who was the medical director at Blue Cross of Pennsylvania when I presented to them back last century but is now the CEO of HighMark (since BC and BA merged), points out the rational logic for private (non-profit)...

TECH: Intel inside, but inside what?

I spent Monday morning at a press conference where Louis Burns, the head of Intel’s health initiative, talked about what Intel is up to in health care, and Robert Pearl, the CEO of TPMG (the Kaiser doctor group), talked about...

POLICY: Can Consumerism Save Healthcare? by Brian Klepper

THCB welcomes back old friend Brian Klepper from the Center for Practical Health Reform. He’s been asked to help various newspapers through the maze of consumer-driven health care, and here’s his take on the matter. You’ll note he gives it...

TECH: Reality check from HISTalk

MrHISTalk this morning gives a reminder to the world that health care IT ain't a place of hot innovation Computerworld correctly identifies a lack of hospital funds as a barrier to the interoperability lovefests going on, but then says this:...

POLICY: How did this sneak into the WSJ?

The opinion pages of the WSJ are known for being full of neo-cons and conservatives -- people who think that they know what's best for you and aren't afraid of getting the US Government to use its power to enforce...

THCB: Friday's out with the trash

So a few quickies. I’m getting lots of requests for advertising/sponsorship on the blog and with John’s help we now have a link at the top for advertising information. So if you have a product or service to sell and...

POLICY: Elsewhere, I'm talking about pooling and employer subsidies for Part D

So I just wrote about pooling and why it’s a necessity over at Spot-On, and I had a little to say about the revelations about employer subsidies buried in Part D over at TPMCafe. Please go take a read and...

BLOGS: Health Wonk Review

Inspired by the Nick doing Grand Rounds, Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters has put together the first bi-weekly edition of a compendium of the best of blogging about health care policy, business, technology and anything that isn’t really clinical...

OFF-TOPIC: This is pretty funny

Test your hunting prowess and compare it to dick Cheney's: quailhuntingschool

Consumers: Patient Power Inc.

Somebody has come up with the really clever idea of building a site specializing in patient empowerment t-shirts. A new company called MedTees has set up an online store where you can find pro-patient stuff you would never find anywhere...

TECH: WebMD, a little curious...

Milt Freudenhiem gets to chat with Marty Wygod, and what he wants to talk about is how WebMD Health “Wants to Go Beyond Information”. WebMD is the old consumer web businesses of WebMD plus the private-labeled consumer sites they run...

Mike Magee, on How Are Insurers Handling Medicare Part D?

I don’t normally pay too much attention to Mike Magee beacause although he has the excellent web address of healthpolitics.com he rarely talks about politics, plus he’s sponsored heavily by Pfizer and his independence is a little in question. However,...

PHARMA/POLICY: One estimate of what Part D is wasting, with UPDATE

Dean Baker working under the auspices of the liberal Campaign for America's Future has written a study of what is being wasted on Part D. His number is $80 billion a year!. Given that the whole program was originally supposed...

POLICY/QUALITY: Pat Salber on childhood abuse and adult health

Pat Salber has a remarkable and very personal piece on the connection between childhood abuse and poor adult health . There seems to be a direct link and if there is, it certainly puts the “personal responsibility” crowd into a...

POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: South Africa, the future of the US?

I know most of you don't have access to the WSJ, so I'm reprinting liberally from its story about the CDHP in South Africa. You know what I think by now on the subject, but it's worth noting that the...

THCB: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

I’m still experimenting with seeing if I can get a “jobs and job-seekers” community going on THCB Telecare Corporation is looking to hire a senior project manager to lead an enterprise system implementation of a healthcare billing / administrative system...

PHYSICIANS/TECH: Why diagnostic radiologists won't make $400K a year forever

One of the smartest observers of the medical scene, UCSF's Bob Wachter had an interesting article in the NEJM on The Implications of Medical Outsourcing. Here's the key point: By severing the connection between the "assay" and its interpretation, digitization...

QUALITY/PHYSICIAN/PHARMA: Test of Survival

Those of you who like your reality dressed up as fiction might like this new book, which Greg Pawelski recommends as telling lots of truth about the oncology-industrial complex. It’s called A Test of Survival and the web site is...

POLICY: Inside Intel's Health Care System

I'm up over at Spot-on about the health benefits system, and how it’s heading for long-term collapse, focusing on this time a wealthy company that's not from Arkansas: Inside Intel's Health Care System. Meanwhile, I wrote a little about HIMSS,...

TECH: MrHISTalk on HIMSS

Even though I saw him and I was wearing “his” badge, so his whining is a little out of order….MrHISTalk’s write up of HIMSS is fantastic. He must have had a long flight home with a power converter. He’s wasted...

TECH: HIMSS coming, coming

Your correspondent had the somewhat out of body experience of discussing HSAs and “cherry picking” with a Singaporean health minister, followed by eventually getting a back to my grotty motel, and being told that I had to go to another...

POLICY: Well, this is obvious

A new study states the obvious about health policy and the HSA The analysis, conducted by Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., projects that while 3.8 million previously uninsured people would gain health coverage through HSAs as a result of the President's...

TECH: HIMSS - A view from the floor

HIMSS appears to be getting bigger and bigger. There are 23,500 people here and over 800 exhibitors, but segregation is the watchword. The big guys are downstairs in the main exhibit hall, while the smaller companies are in an upstairs...

TECH: GotVoice--pretty cool message solution

Not exactly health care tech, but I find this pretty cool. GotVoice takes messages out of your cell phone or home/office voice mail (It actually leaves them in the saved queue) and emails them to your email inbox as Mp3...

HEALTH PLANS/TECH/POLICY: Health plans and brokers -- pathetic, pathetic, pathetic

I’’m on my way to HIMSS today but in the meantime, more on my ongoing personal struggle to get health insurance….. Remember that I was kicked out (or the association that I bought my insurance through was kicked out) from...

TECH/POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: Canada is more efficient user of MRIs compared to U.S., U.K.

Ian Morrison said in his talk at the P4P conference the other day that no Canadian had ever had an MRI. As a sweeping generalization that's true. But in actual fact a few of them have had one, and they...

POLICY/POLITICS/INDUSTRY: Confessions of a Health Care Hitman?

Over at Spot-on, I'm musing about whether or not I'm a Health Care Hitman. Peter Rost, late of Pfizer, is more or less singing the same tune.

PBMs: More on the enigma of how PBMs make money

California Healthline had an article about PBMs role in Medicare Part D. (Hat tip Joe Paduda). Not entirely un-coincidentally, the report that I wrote with Jane Sarasohn Kahn on The Prescribing Infrastructure: Are we ready for eRx, which CHCF published...

PHARMA/TECH: Should big Pharma be blogging? by Shahid Shah

In the light of the recent tattle in the pharma blogosphere of the hijacking of Cialis’ brand identity and Lilly’s apparent inability to do squat about it, Shahid Shah, who besides being a healthcare IT expert is also becoming a...

QUALITY: Sam Nussbaum saying the time is now for P4P

Sam Nussbaum is Wellpoint’s chief medical director (before that he was on the provider side). Improvement is too slow and variability is too great. Again it’s all been too slow. Cost and quality bear little relationship to each other. In...

QUALITY: Milstein's shark

Arnie Milstein from Mercer is probably the smartest “purchaser” in health care on quality. He’s also the only person explicitly linking the inefficiency in health care to the plight of the middle class un- and under insured….as in this story....

QUALITY/TECH: Brailer on IT in P4P

David “Stalin” Brailer likes being on the west coast, so is happy to come out here and give talks. He says it’s obvious. Health care IT needs P4P. And you can’t recoup the benefits of an EMR unless it’s aligned...

QUALITY: P4P Round table

So there was a round table. You can get the transcript much later, but here’s the shorter and more biased version: Shorter Sam Nussbaum, Chief Med officer, Wellpoint — it’s 6 fold different in different places. We’ve got to measure...

QUALITY: Francois de Brantes from GE, runs Bridges to Excellence

He has three keys to make changes in the health care system 1) Accountability — Everyone needs to account for their performance, and feel that they’re accountable for where their dollars flow. And they find that 25% of their employees...

QUALITY: Brent James on Financial incentives for quality improvement

I’m at a pay for performance meeting in Los Angeles…but no wi-fi in the room so only occasional postings.. The best known name in clinical process improvement is Intermountain’s Brent James. He discovered Deming in 1986; ended up at a...

PHARMA/POLICY: Suggestions for advancing beyond indignation & conventional wisdom, by The Industry Veteran

Today I’m off to a meeting on Pay for Performance, so I hope I’ll have something riveting for you all later. Meanwhile, as I’ve overblogged (and been over-exposed) in the past week or so, I thought that this morning I’d...

THCB: Thanks for coming!

According to my sitemeter, January was my most trafficked month ever, and this current week is shaping up to be my busiest ever -- other than the one when the WSJ linked to me. So thanks for coming, and please...

POLICY/HOSPITALS: Outsourcing West Virginia's Health Care

THCB can't claim to focus much on health policy (or anything else going on) in West Virginia. Bob Coffield, who writes the Health Law Blog, does a bit more, probably because he lives there. And he picked up this very...

TECH: CRM in health care, it's about time

This vendor says that the time is right for real aggressive CRM from health plans. He's optimistic, but he might be right

PHARMA/POLICY: Anyone know about best price?

This is pretty interesting, and it relates to real wonkery AND to more stretching of the truth by my favorite health plan lobbyist, Karen Ignagni. In the article Drug firms to get profits windfall, a Univ of Minnesota Professor estimates...

POLICY: From the country that loves the HSA

The future of American health insurance, South African style — Patients bleed hospitals dry Hospitals in Limpopo are owed about R146m by patients whose medical aid companies haven't settled their bills and those who lied about being poor. Limpopo has...

POLICY: I'm up elsewhere

Most stuff from me today is not here on THCB. Over at Spot-On I’m Amazed at Bush’s moderation? (no, not really), Meanwhile, I’ve been blogging a storm, well a mild wind, over at TPMCafe about the guts of what’s going...

POLICY: Kevin Drum. Kevin Dumb?

I know he's got a lot on his mind but leading liberal blogger Kevin Drum writing in his blog at The Washington Monthly actually wrote this in his post about HSAs: These proposals sound pretty good, don't they? Did he...

TECH: Live from the HISsies

MrHISTalk's deputy Billy "Biff" JutJaw brings you the results of the HISsies. About as straight as West Palm Beach election, but a damn site funnier!

OFF-TOPIC/TECH: In the shower this morning I was thinking of going short, with UPDATE

And in my fantasy stock trading moments — Damn Damn Damn But you might like my commment buried in a post over at Ezra's when the stock was at $450, ooh as long ago as early last month! Ezra’s one...

PBMs: Is PCMA learning AHIP's tricks?

I'm so fond of analyzing "research" by AHIP that I've missed some from PCMA, the trade group of the PBMs. But if you go to their site you'll learn that you, the consumer, are about to save $1.3 trillion over...

QUALITY/POLICY: French fries for kids with their HSAs

For those of you too lazy to read Nick Kristof's NYT column on why we're so unhealthy, Pat Salber has summarized it for you.

PHARMA/POLICY: Richard Paey's case hits 60 Minutes

Richard Paey was put in jail for 25 years basically taking pain pills, so that instead the state in Florida can fund his medical care. Oh the prosecutor said that he forged prescriptions, even though at first he wanted to...