The Health Care Blog

BEST OF: Interview with Shawn Jenkins, CEO BenefitFocus

When I was contacted by the PR folks representing BenefitFocus I found out that they'd quietly put into place the original 1995 business plan of Healtheon--connecting employers and health plans electronically around enrollment and billing. (Remember The New New Thing?)...

FRIDAY FUNNY: Big Pharma Outsources all "Bad Stuff" to Sri Lanka

Or at least that’s what Steve Woodruff at Impactiviti blog thinks it’s doing!

POLICY: The DEA continue their sorry role

In raiding like Gestapo officers and then shutting down all the medical marijuana dispensaries in San Mateo county Thursday, the DEA confirmed the sensible opinion that it’s ana gency filled with total scumbags. I guess we can blame the cowardly...

HEALTH 2.0 UPDATE

We're pleased to announce a number of new additions to the roster of speakers at Health 2.0. First, we welcome Dr. David Brailer, formerly the Bush administration's National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology and now the head of Health Evolution...

PHARMA: Why Stretch? by Maggie Mahar

Why does the pharmaceutical industry pour billions into direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads? One explanation is that drugmakers need a way to market new products that they are having a hard time selling to doctors—at least this is what one medical ethicist...

POLICY: Guesses at important dates...

In the comments to Brian Klepper’s piece yesterday, troublemaker commenter JD asks the following Matt, I don't know if you can do polls on this site, but I'd be interested to see what the readers here would guess as the...

POLICY: Health Care Reform Now? Don't Hold Your Breath

While Brian goes into the details of what's need for reform, it just so happens that a few weeks back I wrote an op-ed for the LA Times suggesting that the current "crisis" wasn't bad enough. As (after soliciting the...

Reform's Tougher Problem by Brian Klepper

Yesterday, Matthew gracefully pointed to my post over at Bob Laszewski's Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review, which I called "The Tougher Health Care Problem." Bob's readership leans heavily toward the DC-based health care policy types who may not follow...

POLICY: Nanotechnology and the Regulation of New Technologies by Bart Mongoven

Bart Mongoven is a senior analyst with Austin based strategic intelligence consultancy Stratfor.com, where he tracks public policy. This piece first appeared in the Stratfor Public Policy Intelligence Report. If you find his analysis interesting, you may want to take...

HEALTH PLANS: Who said this? No, really

But if you take five people who didn’t get coverage through their employer or were self-employed and you ask them, ‘What’s the No. 1 thing that keeps you awake at night?’ I think a large percentage would say health care....

POLICY: Klepper, moonlighting again!

Just when we thought we had him pinned down, Brian is moonlighting over at Bob L’s blog. His piece is called Solving the Access Problem Isn't Enough If We Don't Deal With Costs. Not absolutely true in my view. I...

Another Step Toward Transparency -- Brian Klepper

It was the great economist Adam Smith who said that, for markets to work, they need (among other things) "perfect information." Health care hasn't worked, in large measure, because its markets have had almost no information. So in what could...

PHARMA/QUALITY: Merrill Goozner has dug into "The Most Costly Earmark in S-CHIP"

GoozNews: The Most Costly Earmark in S-CHIP Increased risk of death. No benefit. Higher costs for taxpayers. The ongoing Epo saga, whose latest chapter is being written on Capitol Hill, is a perfect example of why our health care outcomes...

OFF-TOPIC: AC/DC lead singer choice impacting economics

This is very important research. I’m just not sure why.

What Are They Thinking: ONCHIT and RTI - Brian Klepper

I'm sure I don't really get the deeper issues involved here, but sometimes its hard to not have your breath taken away by some people's notion of a good idea. Maybe its because I'm not a true geek, but what...

Evaluating the Quality of Quality Improvement Claims: The Population Health Impact Institute - Brian Klepper

Thomas Wilson PhD is on a mission that's important to health care. Tom, a respected epidemiologist particularly well-known in disease management circles, founded the Population Health Impact Institute (PHII), a not-for-profit devoted to establishing clear, objective rules to evaluate claims...

THCB: Matthew's back, and many thanks to Brian Klepper

This is a photo of some of what I've been up to while I was away....and to those of you who asked, yes it was as wonderful as we'd hoped, in an "oh so on the beach in Northern California"...

Health Care Wonk Review Is Up - Brian Klepper

Every month, some good soul hosts Health Care Wonk Review, an eclectic gathering of posts from around the expert health care blogosphere. This month, its Daniel Goldberg at the Medical Humanities Blog, and he's assembled a genuinely superb collection of...

Benign Neglect and the Nursing Shortage - Brian Klepper

I sit on the Dean's Advisory Councils of the Colleges of Health at two public universities in Florida. Both Colleges are led by extremely capable PhD nurses, and have a variety of programs that train students to be health professionals,...

HHS Secretary Leavitt's New Blog - Brian Klepper

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt has a new blog. While its hard to know what information the posts will contain once he settles in, it can only be a good thing for a public official to lay out his thoughts in...

Not Paying For Preventable Errors: A Big Step - Brian Klepper

Fee-For-Service (FFS) reimbursement has been disastrous for the American health care system because, instead of encouraging the delivery of the RIGHT products and services, it simply encourages MORE, and independent of quality and safety. The system lacks transparency, so we...

OMNI: The Oncology Metrics National Index - Brian Klepper

An innovative Ft. Worth consulting firm comprised of experienced oncology professionals, Oncology Metrics, has linked private oncology practices throughout the country in a collaborative, knowledge-sharing enterprise, called the Oncology Circle. The first round of information brought together 22 practices containing...

Outrageous by Eric Novack

Outrageous!! First and foremost—congratulations to Matthew and Amanda on their wedding!!! Now to the outrage!!! In Friday’s Boston Globe , health reporter Alice Dembner reports the plight of a 60 year old woman who has to pay twice the amount...

Essential Reading: Laszewski on Rove and Medicare D - Brian Klepper

All of us who have worked in policy during our careers know the old joke that there are two things you never want to see made: sausage and laws. Never was this more true than with Medicare D. Earlier this...

HEALTH2.0: The People's choice award

By now you know that the Health2.0–User Generated Healthcare Conference organized by Matthew Holt (THCB) and Indu Subaiya (Etude Scientific) is all set to take place on September 20th in San Francisco. Among other things, there are four fabulous demo...

Can We Talk, Frankly? - Brian Klepper

Over at The Doctor Weighs In, Bill Bestermann literally grabs our attention and forces feeds us a highly informative, and, dare I say, USEFUL physiology lesson in If You Want To Get It Up - You've Got To Get It...

A Broker Afterthought: An Acknowledgment, An Apology and A Criticism - Brian Klepper

In the comment section of my post on broker compensation, KWeller properly points out that 1) some states regulate broker commissions more stringently than Florida does and 2) I do a disservice to brokers who practice without financial conflict. He...

Consultants to Hospitals: Prepare for Transparency - Brian Klepper

We must view and treat the community as the "owner" to whom we are fully accountable. Aggregate financial performance data, aggregate productivity performance and aggregate quality and patient satisfaction data belong in the public realm. How else can consumers make...

Podcast: Mello on Health Courts

Professor Michele Mello, an expert on the health care justice system at the Harvard School of Public Health, has an interesting 9.5 minute audio podcast on why health courts would be an improvement over the current medical liability system. The...

The Presidential Candidates On Health Care

Over at the Huffington Post, Dr. Susan Blumenthal and her team at the DC-based Center for the Study of the Presidency, have released their third in a series of articles comparing the Presidential candidates positions on various aspects of health...

Managed Care Redux - by Brian Klepper

Like democracy, managed care is a great idea. It's just that its rarely been tried. Even so, my guess is that its about to re-emerge in a new, improved form, and possibly with some other name. If the signs around...

Pharma PR: Either ‘Roid Rage or Comatose by The Industry Veteran

Two examples emerged in the last few days to indicate that Big Pharma’s CEOs are unable or unwilling to control the functional departments of their companies. The first involves GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) where CEO J.P. Garnier actually instigated the problem instead...

It's Dawned On The New York Times Too - Brian Klepper

It would have been hard for the Times to have lobbed the Health 2.0 conference a slower pitch. They have a nice piece today, Dr. Google and Dr. Microsoft, explaining how, as health care information becomes increasingly centered around and...

Brokers: Why They Feel Their Commisions Are Justified (Sort Of) - Brian Klepper

As you might imagine, yesterday's post on the excessive and deceptive nature of broker compensation raised a few hackles. I received several protests from brokers/agents who argued that they are saddled with inordinate responsibilities in exchange for their commissions. In...

Brokers: A Price Above Rubies by Brian Klepper

OK. Now that Matthew’s away, let take a break from picking on the doctors, the hospitals, the health plans, the drug companies, and the device companies. Let’s talk about the brokers. Brokers, you’ll recall, connect health plans and employers. They...

POLICY: These Are Not the Droids You're Looking For by Eric Novack

The NY Times, certainly not known as the bastion of the Right, snuck a very important article into the ‘non’ news day of Saturday. Interesting that this did not get saved for the front page on a Monday… In it,...

THCB: A little announcement, and the next week or two on THCB

For the next ten days or so THCB will be having a series of guest authors....please welcome them, and my thanks to them, and to all of you for reading! If you have any THCB, Health2.0 or business questions for...

POLICY/POLITICS: In which I try to make sense of one Republican's uncaring careless approach to health care policy

I’m up at Spot-on trying to make sense of Giuliani on health care. George W. Bush decided that the way to save his presidency from irrelevancy was to threaten a veto of a bipartisan extension of the Childrens Health Insurance...

While Matthew's Away

As many of you know, Matthew has punched his timecard, hung up his keyboard, and is blissfully away with his beloved on a well-deserved honeymoon. With consulting gigs, the daily demands of maintaining the best and most entertaining health care...

BLOGS: This is bizzarre

Apparently, a guy who's now a leading liberal blogger, Jerome Armstrong, was touting stocks online without revealing that he was paid to do so. He just paid a $30,000 fine to settle the case. And apparently his partner Markos Zunigas...

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS: The future of health plans

I had fun writing this piece on behalf of health plan CRM and Business Outsourcing company Connextions to help launch their new series of Thought Leadership Profiles. Some of the really rude stuff hit the cutting room floor, but given...

POLITICS/POLICY: Hillary kicks idiot butt

I’m not exactly a huge Hillary Clinton fan, but this brief video of her responding to an idiot questioner calling universal medicine “socialized” is pretty funny! Almost more amusing is that there was a Republican in the audience of African-American...

TECH: Identity Theft Protection for Healthcare Companies By Brian Lapidus

Brian Lapidus is a seasoned expert in security and risk mitigation who focuses on the increasing challenges faced by the public and private sectors in protecting sensitive data and personal information from loss, theft and fraud. The chief architect of...

PHARMA: Great history and analysis of the FDA

From Emily Friedman at HHN. It's called Happy Tails, Jake Leg, and the Food and Drug Administration and unusually for a mainstream publication it notes that Prohibition is stupid.

POLICY: Consumer Reports looks at uninsurance

Consumer reports has a new report confirming what most of us suspected about uninsurance. About 30% of those with insurance don't think that it'll cover them and have delayed care as a result. Which in my view is why user...

BLOGS: HWR

Health Wonk Review: the party's at Workers Comp Insider where Julie Ferguson has put together a great collection of wonkery.

Sorta OFF-TOPIC: I know it hurt but...

In your Friday funny.... Police seek 'professionals' who removed St. Paul man's testicles. Apparently this was consumer choice! They must have really hurt before and I'm sure they did afterwards.

THCB Reader Mail

Bazian's Tom Donald responds to critics of evidence-based-medicine in our post discussing the company's new approach to the controversial field. "Unfortunately EBM has, in many circles, become a “dirty word” through its blunt application by insurers and regulators, as well...

TECH: First Opinion--mysterious but now rich

I’ve heard about this company but despite a couple of half-hearted efforts to get in touch never figured out what First Opinion did. The First Opinion system is a medical knowledge-based system designed to give medical advice to the general...

POLICY/PHYSICIANS: In which I criticize Uwe Reinhardt, really!

Uwe Reinhardt has written to the NY Times about What Doctors Make, and Why. It's great that they print his letter--they should be featuring a whole lot more of his stuff in comparison to their penchant for printing out of...