The Health Care Blog

John McCain and The Politics of The Uninsured

By Robert Laszewski John McCain spoke about health care in Tampa on Tuesday and tried to answer many of the questions that have been raised about his health care reform plan. The most pressing question is how would people with...

The 2nd Annual DiabetesMine Design Contest

Over at DiabetesMine #1 blogger Amy Tenderich and her buds at Medgadget have got this years DiabetesMine Design Contest up. The winner gets to go to (and probably demo at) this years Health 2.0 contest—as if you needed more incentive!

After A Short Stay In the US, Michelangelo's David Returns To Florence

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

By THCB STAFF Highly Credible Poll of the Day: Seven percent of Americans marry for health insurance. WSJ Health Blog: In wake of celebrity snooping cases UCLA officials say "new system will make employees list their connection to the patient...

Health Plans vs. Banks - Who is trusted more?

People trust health insurance companies to hold their health spending information more than they trust banks, according to a survey from Medavante. In Cure the Confusion: The Consumer Experience of Online Healthcare, Medavante found that consumers perceived that health plans...

McCain starting to talk about health care

This morning John McCain’s team will be talking about health care. There are some interesting ideas in McCain’s plan, which is the Bush tax deduction idea morphed into a tax credit, plus changes in Medicare payments. The best quick explanation...

Election no big deal for health industries

By Don Johnson McCain to talk about healthcare costs this week ... Health industry executives have few reasons to worry about the so called health care reforms, or health insurance industry reforms, being proposed by the presidential candidates. Sen. John...

The State of Employer-Sponsored Coverage - Brian Klepper

By Brian Klepper A detailed new study from the Economics Policy Institute confirms what many of us suspect but haven't had the data to easily nail down. This weightily-titled report by Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz - A Decade of...

Ron Paul on health reform: shrink government

By Sarah Arnquist If elected president, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, promises to shrink the government's role in health care. Government intervention, he says, is the cause of today's high costs, inefficiencies and lack of personal responsibility. “We can hardly...

The Genetic Discrimination Bill Shows Us Just How Hard Health Care Reform Can Be

By Robert Laszewski About 1990, I was a member of something called the Task Force on Genetic Testing at the then Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA). The health insurance industry realized that, with the Human Genome Project in its...

The Wisdom of Patients - Social Media In Health Care

By Jane Sarasohn Khan People -- citizens, patients, caregivers, "consumers" -- are early adopters of social media i n health, compared to other industry stakeholders including providers, plans, payers, and suppliers such as pharmas and medical equipment companies. This is...

Wikipedia: Time to Pull the Plug

By Craig Stoltz There are many good reasons to deplore Wikipedia, not the least of which is its authors’ cultish smuggery about the righteousness of their cause and the rightness of their content. Of course there is also its internecine...

Americans' Confidence in the FDA Falls Sharply

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Confidence in the FDA has hit bottom. The latest survey on trust in the FDA comes from Harris Interactive, who regularly surveys the public's faith in the regulator. Consumers see the FDA's #1 job as "ensuring the...

Personalized Medicine: Back to the Future

By Scott Shreeve Personalized Medicine The type of sing molecular analysis to achieve optimum medical outcomes in the management of a patient’s disease or disease predisposition, Right treatment for the right patient at the right time. As I have mentioned...

An Open Response To HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt - Brian Klepper and Michael Millenson

By Brian Klepper and Michael Millenson A few months ago, the two of us – both long-time advocates for transparency and accountability – posted separate comments on Secretary Mike Leavitt’s blog. Brian asked Secretary Leavitt to square his support of...

Snooping at Britney's Chart: Why Should Docs and Nurses Have Different Rules?

By Robert Wachter Should doctors and nurses be subject to different penalties for precisely the same infraction? Of course not. Are they? Sure. Just ask Britney Spears. Britney was hospitalized at UCLA at least twice in the past few years...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

By THCB Staff VentureBeat: Emphasis Search, This Year's WebMD, Raises 1M for Specialist Matching Service Surgeons Meet in Second Life: First International Virtual Association Formed (Hat Tip: Medical Quack) WSJ Health Blog: Are General Surgeons the Primary Care Docs of...

Tune Into The Kroll Webcast On The Security of Patient Data - Brian Klepper

By Brian Klepper Exclusive to THCB: A couple weeks ago I pointed to a new study, commissioned by Kroll Fraud Solutions and conducted by HIMSS Analytics, that makes startlingly clear the gap between what most health systems are doing to...

The Legacy of Dr. Jerome Grossman

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn We've lost a major force for good in health care. Dr. Jerome Grossman, once CEO of Tufts-New England Medical Center, passed away yesterday. He was only 68, an example of another good-man-dying-too-young. Dr. Grossman's ideas made big...

Batalden updates Machiavelli

By Paul Levy There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has...

Dollars to Doughnuts

By Eric Novack From the L.A. Times: Dollars to doughnuts diagnosis Do the many THCB proponents of government-run, bureaucrat-controlled, global-budget, everybody in- nobody out, health care advocates want to drive doctors like the author of this article out of medicine?...

Quoteable

By THCB Staff We asked THCB contributor Maggie Mahar for her quick take on the health care policies of each of the presidential candidates. We were pretty much expecting one of Maggie's trademarked dissertations - a meticulously researched critique of...

McCain Would Increase Medicare Part D Premiums

By Robert Laszewski As part of his broader speech on economic issues John McCain last week called for high income seniors to pay more for their D drug coverage. Couples making more than $160,000 a year would pay higher premiums....

Millennial Health Care Delivery

By Scott Shreeve Millennial (adj.) 1. Of or pertaining to the millennium, or to a thousand years 2. Generation of Americans younger than 29 in 2007 with unique social, cultural, and market identity The highlight of last month's Health 2.0...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or less)

GOTHAMIST: "Mayor Bloomberg may have failed with his plan to ease New York City congestion, but at least he can claim victory when it comes to New Yorkers’ digestion. Judge Says Open Wide for Food Calorie Info. US NEWS: Election...

HEALTH 2.0 San Francisco

If you missed Health 2.0 San Diego last month or last year's sold-out Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare in San Francisco, here's your chance. Early bird passes for Health 2.0 San Francisco are now on sale. Buy your passes now and...

Medical Privacy: The Challenge of Behavioral Ad Targeting in Healthcare

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn The latest piece in the medical privacy jigsaw puzzle is online behavioral advertising. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received comments from the Network Advertising Initiative NAI on the agency's proposed principles for OBA. As part...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

Joint Commission to hospitals: Reduce medication errors - pay us to help. Leavitt to WSJ: FDA will open China bureau this year. US, Oz, & Canadian Govts Give Love, $ to Develop Open-Source HIT. Gretzer: McCain plan last best hope...

Should Patient Satisfaction Scores Be Adjusted for Where Patients Shop?

By Robert Wachter Last week, Medicare added patient satisfaction data to its hospital reporting website. This is progress, but it raises an interesting question: should patient satisfaction scores be case-mix adjusted? The motivation to include patient satisfaction data comes from...

THCB is sponsored by ...

Overlake Medical Center is a 337-bed, nonprofit, state-of-the-art medical facility equipped to deliver the highest standards of medical care to the Puget Sound Region. Overlake is seeking primary care and specialty physicians to join our growing network of clinics located...

Quoteable

By THCB Staff Herbert Rubin M.D. apparently did not enjoy Jane Sarahson Kahn's piece last week reporting the results of the recent Annals of Internal Medicine study examining physician attitudes towards national health insurance. Here is his email to us,...

The Changing of the Guard

By Jeff Goldsmith For the past 30 years, the U.S. health care system has been powered by baby boomer physicians, many of whom are now considering retirement at a younger age than prior generations due to burnout, deteriorating practice economics,...

As I Was Saying…

By Eric Novack As can be read in my response to Jane’s touting the wonderful results of the non-study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine recently (and well noted by the much maligned on THCB, but usually correct Greg...

THCB is proudly sponsored by CDW Healthcare

John McCain: Never a Day Without Government Health Insurance

By Sarah Arnquist Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) emphasizes freedom, personal choice and responsibility when promoting his plan to reform America’s health care system. He’s not calling for an incremental approach but "nothing short of a complete...

When You Go to an ER and There's No One There to Take Care of You

By Maggie Mahar Recently, I’ve been reading less-well known health care blogs—and finding some provocative stories. Below, Edwin Leap--who is a physician and a blogger--tells a story about trying to find a specialist for a very sick child in the...

Health 2.0 Unconference NL

The first European Health 2.0 Unconference is happening this Saturday in Amsterdam, and we have a location folks! We'll be brainstorming, cloudtagging, liveblogging and all that jazz. What is our (Dutch) definition of Health 2.0? Come, define, share at the...

Health 1.0h. . .Geez, This Is a Mess

By Craig Stoltz A family member just had surgery, but don't worry, this isn't about that. I want to share just one observation from the experience: Between the decision to have surgery and the moment scalpel touched flesh, the patient's...

Most Doctors Want A National Health Plan

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Six in ten U.S. physicians support a national health plan to achieve universal coverage. A 2002 poll among American doctors was updated in 2007 to determine how physicians' feelings about national health insurance (NHI) may have changed...

Why it's impossible to close a hospital

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Hospitals are major employers in their local markets; they are often the largest provider of jobs in a community. In its latest TrendWatch report, Beyond Healthcare: The Economic Contribution of Hospitals, the American Hospital Association details the...

Is Non-Profit Business An Oxymoron?

By Paul Levy An April 4 article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Nonprofit Hospitals, Once For the Poor, Strike It Rich" has prompted a slew of comments on wsj.com. I think they are worth reading and do not intend...

Fourth Annual Games for Health Conference 2008

May 8-9, 2008 :: Baltimore Convention Center The Games for Health Conference offers a rich platform for learning, promotion, networking and business development for organizations interested in the intersection between games and health. Topics to be covered include exergaming, medical...

Weightism: The newest discrimination in America?

By Sarah Arnquist Few would dispute that curbing rising rates of obesity is one of the greatest public health challenges of the 21st Century, yet as a nation, we grapple with how to talk about being fat. The Centers for...

An Invitation to DNANYC

The Board of Directors and Advisors of Navigencs invite you to join us for a series of seminars, panel discussions and other events dedicated to helping you thrive in this new world of truly individualized health and wellness. DNANYC Presented...

Lack of health insurance forces man to become rich, famous pimp

By Michael Millenson OK, that wasn't the title on an article in the metro section of the April 7 New York Times. But there, buried in the fine print of a story about Emperor's Club VIP -- the high-priced international...

The Security of Patient Data

By Brian Klepper EXCLUSIVE TO THCB: HIMSS Analytics, the research arm of the powerful, thoughtful and highly regarded Health Information Management Systems Society, has published a sobering study, Security of Patient Data - see here - that highlights the gap...

You’ve Gotta Spend Money to Save Money ...

By Eric Novack Or so the thought is by many in the health care world. Thus, the motivation for chronic care management programs was born. CMS, the august government body charged with overseeing Medicare (and Medicaid), instituted a 3 year,...

Knowledge Like Clear, Clean Water: Muir Gray on Health Care's Progress

By Brian Klepper Over the last year or so, I've written a lot about how health care information will become increasingly available to consumers and health care business, and how this access will drive new decision-support capabilities that will profoundly...

The (Non)-Profit Motive

By Eric Novack From today's Wall Street Journal: "Nonprofit Hospitals, Once For the Poor, Strike it Rich." It has long, and often, been argued here on THCB and so many other places, that if we simply ‘take the profit motive...

Patient Ping-Pong: Cholesterol

By George Van Antwerp As if it’s not already difficult for patients to navigate their benefits, DTC advertising, and all the healthcare information on the web, it seems we are structurally trying to make it more difficult. With the recent...