The Health Care Blog

TECH: Cisco's briefing

A little about my day job today. I’m sitting in a video briefing hosted by Cisco for its provider clients being broadcast to 10 sites. I’m in the one in San Jose, where there are lots and lots of interested...

POLICY: California Policy Update By John Irvine

With support apparently growing for the Schwarzenegger plan in California, opponents are already laying the groundwork for a legal challenge. The Financial Times (UK) quotes business sources as saying lawsuits are "all but inevitable" if the plan passes in Sacramento....

TECH: Social networks in healthcare

In the Digital HealthCare & Productivity I’ve written a short piece on social networks in healthcare. Some of the usual suspects (Sermo, OrganizedWisdom, DailyStrength, Revolution) show up.

TECH/PHYSICIANS/INDUSTRY: Now the Communists have infiltrated the officer ranks!

(Speaker adopts very pompous tone) You may remember a little while back that some left wing seditious journalist criticized the sanctity of our free and opaque market system. He claimed that a leading back surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic --...

POLICY/POLITICS: Spitzer calls a spade a spade w/UPDATE

Eliot Spitzer calls a spade a spade in his speech about reforming healthcare in New York. He goes after two of the biggest subsidized sacred cows: 1) Medicaid costs which are double the national average. In fact New York spends...

PHARMA: Off label marketing and the 2008 election, by The Industry Veteran

For those of you bitter at not seeing enough of The Industry Veteran, he’s back! This time he’s complaining about Pfizer’s off-label marketing and linking it to the Presidential race. For those of you who’ve had too much of him…..sorry!...

INTERNATIONAL: Japan's Health Minister engages mouth, brain not yet in gear

You've got to hope that this one was "lost in translation"! Japan's health minister described women as "birth-giving machines" in a speech on the falling birthrate, drawing criticism despite an immediate apology. "The number of women between the ages of...

POLICY: NCPA--the Manchurian think-tank?

Most people think that John Goodman’s shop NCPA is made up of libertarians and conservatives—and their leaders and their donors apparently hope so. That’s what one of their number told me at the Vegas conference this week, where true to...

POLICY/PHARMA: Doing Drugs the Right Way

At Huffington Post, Vince Beiser on Vancouver’s harm reduction strategy.

POLICY: Cato Unbound conversation

The Cato Unbound January 2007 conversation about health care is wrapped up. More good stuff from Arnold Kling, Clark Havighurst, Jon Cohn and yours truly. Please go read, but don’t expect too much agreement in the end!

POLICY/POLITICS: Spitzer has big health care reform plans

Eliot Spitzer has big health care reform plans. And why would he want to be left out of all the fun? Moreover, he has the big problem/opportunity of all that lovely WF&A in New York Medicaid

POLICY/POLITICS: Bush's Health Plan

I'm up over at Spot-on discussing the basics of Bush's Health Plan. Go read and return to comment. I was awakened during my slumber through the State of the Union by a mention from President George Bush of a health...

POLITICS: Obama seems to be coming at Clinton from the left

Although he’s regarded as a sell-out by Harpers, Obama seems to be taking the sensible tack that Hillary Rodham Clinton won’t survive the Democratic primaries based on her pro-Iraq war vote and her incrementalist health care strategy. Today he called...

BLOGS: HWR up, feisty

And found at Health Affairs Blog.

PHARMA/PHYSICIANS: Big joke-Free CME: Pharmed out doesn't impress The Industry Veteran

THCB regulars will be missing the delicate tones of The Industry Veteran. But never fear, he’s back and none the less caustic for his lay-off from these hallowed electrons. Here’s his take on the new CME for doctors. No doubt...

POLICY/PHARMA/HEALTH PLANS: Michael Cannon doesn't understand market incentives

Michael Cannon (sensible libertarian, Cato Institute) has noted that Those Who Sell Out Will Eventually Be Punished. What he means is that once the pharmaceutical industry did the “deal with the devil” in 2003 for the creation of Medicare part...

QUALITY/INTERNATIONAL: More confusing international comparisons

I don’t know much about medical care, but I do remember that in Lynn Payer’s Medicine and Culture the most amusing factoid was that German doctors put people whose blood pressure was too low on medication to raise it. Does...

TECH/BLOGS: Case preaches open health care

This I like. Steve Case has his own blog at Revolution Health, called The Revolution Manifesto. There was lots of interest about him on the Webinar I did this morning. And no, Indu, I'm not going to declare a winner...

HEALTH PLANS: Does this sound in the least familiar?

From Government News of the Week:. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) said his office has received complaints that Assurant, Inc. denied claims based on questionable conclusions about patients' pre-existing conditions. The AG's office said it received 20 complaints against...

THCB: Advert

Business of Healthcare Conference Saturday Feb 3, 2007 Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Panels will include topics on Health Care IT, Health Care Policy, Payor/Provider, and more. For further details, and to register please go to http://www.haashealthcareconference.org/

QUALITY/TECH: A nice conversation with Brent James

This is possibly the most interesting podcast yet on THCB. And it's certainly the longest. if you didn't have the time to listen to the interview with Brent James, here's the transcript. I really recommend this one--there are so many...

TECH/POLICY: Yet another PHR, and some info on me speaking

There's a new PHR for university students in Nebraska only. Not that that really says much other than the buzz around them continues. In response to a question over at HISTalk, I want to remind y'all that many of my...

POLICY: The libertarian bickering conintues!

More bickering between Jon Cohn, me, and the sensible libertarians Arnold Kling & Clark Havinghurst over at Cato Unbound . It’s a follow up to the articles we all wrote, and now Kling replied to all three of us, we’ve...

POLICY/HOSPITALS: (Google) Mapping NYC Health Care Disparity: 1985-2007, by Mike Connery, The Opportunity Agenda

About 9 months ago research director of The Opportunity Agenda, Brian Smedley, guest-blogged on THCB about a New England Journal of Medicine study. his colleague Mike Connery wrote to me to tell me about this: Yesterday, as part of our...

TECH: Banks & PHRs?

Mona Baker tells us about a new market entry: Banks to Deliver Personal Health Records Online

PHARMA: Remember the AIDS medicine in Africa fuss?

Remember when big pharma got its PR arse handed to it for denying third world countries the right to make cheap generic AIDS medicines? There seems to be the same kind of controversy starting up with biologic products in cancer...

HEALTH PLANS/POLICY: Meter Reading--How Regulation Might Fail

Today I’m up at Spot-on in a piece about the influence of big health plans on reform efforts called Meter Reading: How Regulation Might Fail. Maybe, just maybe, we're getting serious about health care. This week's news says yet more...

POLICY: Kling's Response to Holt, Havighurst, and Cohn

Arnold Kling’s response to Holt, Havighurst, and Cohn is up at Cato Unbound. You know that I and Jon Cohn are going to largely find fault with Arnold Kling, while Clark Havighurst is a fellow traveler who actually says very...

TECH: More on Revolution Health

Over at tech blog TechCrunch, there’s a piece on Revolution Health. What’s most interesting is the comment section, where the CEOs from DailyStrength, Organized Wisdom, and others and the Chief Medical Officer of Revolution itself all pitch in. Frankly, the...

TECH: Free eRx from Allscripts and friends, with UPDATE

Allscripts, backed by a cast of friends, is going to let any physician in America sign up for its ASP-based eRx system (which links into Surescripts) for free. The coalition is called the National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) and...

TECH: Sermo gets a little more famous

Sermo, which has been featured on THCB as one of those Health2.0 companies that are changing the game, gets a little more fame in this Long Island Newsday article.

POLICY: The Other Losing War

Well worth a read -- a NY Times op-ed from a Jamaican academic called The Other Losing War and this column from a Scottish Labour Party MP about prohibition in Scotland, which is causing a little fuss there.

CONSUMERS/QUALITY: A DIY Approach to the Diabetes Epidemic by Amy Tenderich

#1 health care blogger, well actually #1 patient blogger, but probably the most important one in the whole medical blogosphere, Amy Tenderich has written a book called called Know Your Numbers, Outlive Your Diabetes about (obviously) how to manage diabetes....

POLICY: California's Healthcare Plan: Setting the National Debate By Bart Mongoven

Bart Mongoven is an analyst with Austin-based Stratfor.com and the author of the Stratfor Public Policy Intelligence Report. In this piece he examines the obstacles facing the Schwarzenegger health care plan on the national and local levels and reaches a...

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS: Wow, a loony libertarian unwittingly tells the truth on benefit mandates

In the mass of verbiage about the Schwarzenegger plan, you can find the odd interesting nugget. David Henderson from Hoover—writing in that bastion of reasoned clarity, the editorial section of the WSJ—admits that the impact of state mandated benefits on...

POLITICS: Sacramento, We Have A Problem

Up at Spot-on I’m discussing Arnie’s plan — Sacramento, We Have A Problem. As ever, return here to comment. When looking at the Golden State's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his attempt to fix health care, I am reminded of a...

Reaction to Arnie-geddon in Californian health care

Meanwhile as you might expect, two of the more sensible editorials about the Schwarzenegger plan have been written by Leif Wellington Haase (Century Foundation) and Jonathan Cohn (New Republic). They’re both somewhat more optimistic than I am that a) something...

BLOGS: Health Wonk Review Hosted This Week on Health Care Renewal

Health Wonk Review -- is up at Health Care Renewal

POLICY: Me. A loony libertarian?

Not exactly but I am up at Cato Unbound with a piece replying to Arnold Kling's fascinating essay "Insulation v Insurance." Read his first, then read mine. It's called Abundance Is Insulated from a Crisis--For Now. In his insightful book...

QUALITY: All is not well in the DM world

Last year LifeMasters pulled out of one of the Medical Health Support DM pilots in rural Oklahoma because they found that adhering to the proper standards of care made the cost of care go up for those patients they enrolled,...

TECH: JSK's 2007 Health IT Forecast

Whoops. I almost missed this as it went out late last year. Here, at iHealthbeat, is the ever wonderful Jane Sarasohn Kahn’s 2007 Tech Forecast.

PHYSICIANS: Remember, it's a FFS world

Remember kids, almost all physicians work in a FFS world. HSC reminds us: While the proportion of physicians in group practice whose compensation is based in part on quality measures increased from 17.6 percent in 2000-01 to 20.2 percent in...

POLICY/POLITICS: I love the guy's moxie

Say what you like about Arnold, but you got to give him credit for being a proper flip-flopper with real moxie. While Bush drowns in his stay-the-course quagmire, Arnold has repudiated basically everything he claimed to care about when he...

POLICY/POLITICS: It's all the illegal Austrian socialist's fault

It’s all quite amusing. You wouldn’t know it, but there are no problems with health care in California, and what Arnie did yesterday was a display of showing his true feelings—a combination of handouts to illegal aliens and an introduction...

TECH: Healthcare Blogger and Reader Meet-up at HIMSS in New Orleans

Shahid Shah is the official HIMSS blogger, and he’s running a meet-up. When will it be? Depends on when you want it. Go to his site and have your say….Healthcare Blogger and Reader Meet-up at HIMSS in New Orleans

HEALTH PLANS/POLICY: And it's a right, and a left, and another right--I'm not sure he can take any more...

You’d think the LA Times’s Lisa Girion would have had the human decency to stop beating up the health insurance industry. It’s getting close to the time when the referee should step in to save the insurers from further punishment....

TECH: Nerd med student builds "the GMR, An EMR That Doesn't Suck"

Graham Walker, Stanford med student and blogger, is such a nerd that he's built what he thinks is a better interface for an EMR--trying to make it a true desktop work-tool using Web2.0 type tools. I'm not an expert on...

POLIC: Tom Tommorrow explains how to get health care

It may be a cartoon, but it’s not really a joke.

TECH/CONSUMERS/BLOGS: Information Therapy and Other Ways to Change the World

Josh Seidman, the President of the Center for Information Therapy, and someone I must confess to knowing and liking, has descended into the mire and started his own blog. He told me that a friend had suggested it to him—I...

TECH/CONSUMERS/HEALTH PLANS: Not much employer backing for HSAs

Those of us who feel that the CDHP movement is largely being used as cover by employers for reducing the benefits (i.e. compensation) that they’re paying employees will not be too surprised by this new analysis. The source, Vimo, though...