The Health Care Blog

Imagining the Possible

By Bruce Pyenson, Sara Goldberg and Kate Fitch The emperor we call American healthcare is wearing no clothes—or perhaps too many clothes. The United States spends too much on healthcare. More than 25% of our healthcare dollars are wasted on...

So what's the real usual, customary and reasonable price of care?

By Matthew Holt The Ingenix mess apparently won’t go away. Sen. Jay Rockefeller is now going after the health plans for using Ingenix’ database. Ingenix and some of its customer health plans have already settled with several states, but apparently...

Will CIGNA Remake The Health Plan Marketplace?

By BRIAN KLEPPER America’s health plans are floundering. If their job has been to provide the nation’s mainstream families with access to affordable care (let’s leave quality out of it for the moment), they have failed miserably, though they were...

Sustainable Healthcare Reform

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was quoted as raising the possibility we could take the $600 billion in new revenue projected from a "cap-and-trade" plan to cut green house-gas emissions and use some or all...

Leave Natasha Richardson out of the health care debate

By Sarah Arnquist Please don’t turn Natasha Richardson’s tragic death into a symbol for why Canadian-style universal health care is bad and the United States is better. In the last six hours, I’ve seen articles from at least a dozen...

Commentology

Steven M. Parker of Levelwing was among those who weighed in on the volatile comment thread on Rick Scott's Friday post. ("Patient-based Health Reform or Fannie Med?") Steve had this response to critics who attacked the CPR founder over his...

Classified: 2009 DiabetesMine Design Challenge

Passionate about Diabetes and product design? Whether you're an enterprising patient or parent, a startup company, a design student, an independent developer or engineer, or a pharma R&D pro. Sponsored by the California Healthcare Foundation. (CHCF). Prizes include $10,000 in...

Health 2.0 Meets Ix--The Great Debates

By Matthew Holt, Indu Subaiya and Joshua Seidman On April 22–23 in Boston, two ideas are going to come together. Health 2.0 has been defined in different ways, but is most often considered to be the use of lightweight online...

Patient-based Health Reform or "Fannie Med?"

By Richard Scott Set against the backdrop of the $787 billion stimulus bill and deficit spending that dwarfs the federal outlays of FDR's New Deal and LBJ’s “Great Society,” the idea of spending hundreds of billions - or even trillions...

CLASSIFIED: Yale School of Management’s Healthcare Conference 2009

“Where is the Value? Managing Cost and Quality in a Healthcare System Facing Reform.” April 3rd at the Omni Hotel in New Haven, CT. A full-day summit of industry leaders, students, and academics discussing current topics of industry concern as...

The Hawaii Health 2.0 Chapter meeting

By Matthew Holt Indu & Matthew traveled to Hawaii (tough gig but someone’s got to do it) to take part in the Hawaii Health 2.0 chapter on Online Care, held on Thursday March 26. The chapter meeting was rather more...

A Research Agenda for Participatory Medicine and the Connected Medical Home

By DAVID C. KIBBE AND JOSEPH KVEDAR 

Recently, in a blog post published December 22, 2008 in The Health Care Blog entitled "The Connected Medical Home,” we described the synergy between the efforts of proponents of Participatory Medicine and the...

Karen Ignagni lie of the day, part 68

By Matthew Holt The big insurers now seem to be doing anything they can to prevent a Medicare-equivalent public plan being launched to beat them up. Yes AHIP has apparently decided to throw the schlockmeisters off the boat, and more...

PharmaSURVEYOR

PharmaSURVEYOR is The Most Advanced Drug Safety Utility for consumers and professionals alike. PharmaSURVEYOR offers a personalized drug assessment tool designed to show users not only drug-drug interactions but the much more common and often dangerous adverse drug side effects...

Two Birds With One Stone: Covering the Uninsured by Fixing Medicare

By Victor M. Sandler, MD As a nation, we are in a heap of trouble. Our medical system is a disaster—overly expensive and ineffective. On average, we spend two to three times more per capita on health care than other...

A Healthcare IT Primer

By JOHN HALAMKA Now that Healthcare IT is part of the stimulus and newsworthy, I receive many questions from reporters about the fundamentals of healthcare IT. Here's a primer with the Top 10 questions and answers: 1. Can you define...

Health Care Reform: Ideology, Self-Interest and Rhetoric

By Humphrey Taylor and Ian Morrison Thirty years ago, one of us asked the retiring CEO of one of the largest drug companies what was the worst mistake he had made as CEO. Without hesitating he said, “Opposing Medicare. We...

Drug war lunacy--Connecting the Dots

By Matthew Holt Next month the Supreme Court will be given the chance to redress one minor the lunacy of the last thirty years of the so-called “war on drugs”. It will get to decide whether in the name of...

Narrow Networks - Part II

By CHARLIE BAKER For the past six years, Harvard Pilgrim has offered a limited network product to our New Hampshire members called “New Hampshire NetOption.” Simply put, all New Hampshire providers are Tier One providers - lowest co-pays - and...

The Public Program Impasse: A Proposal

By ROGER COLLIER Health care reform proponents could find encouragement in recent Obama administration comments on the issue of taxing health care benefits. The President, having adamantly rejected the concept during last year’s campaign (thereby violating a cardinal rule of...

Commentology

JR wrote to us with an interesting question: "Given the attempt to recover bonus payments to AIG, can you envision a scenarios where CMS attempts to recover payments from physicians that they retroactively deem too high? What if a new...

Health Wonk Review, up and intense at HealthBlawg

By Matthew Holt David Harlow did a great job, go see.

Bluementhal is new health IT czar

By Matthew Holt David Blumenthal, known slightly more for being a policy wonk than a geek (or perhaps known best for being a wonk about geek issues!), has been appointed the new Director of the Office of the National Coordinator...

Don't think anything is certain on the reform front

By Matthew Holt And in more from the "is it really bad enough out there to guarantee health reform?" front... Pew Research is out with a poll showing that the numbers in favor of a major health care system reform...

Those Goody Goody Canadians Not So Good

By MICHAEL MILLENSON C’mon admit it: you’re sick of hearing how those goody-goody Canadians provide comprehensive health care to all, while we let an estimated 22,000 Americans die each year (http://www.urban.org/publications/411588.html ) because they don’t have coverage. Or the way...

Tom Epstein, Blue Shield of California, on the hot seat

By Matthew Holt A couple of weeks ago the PR company for Blue Shield of California contacted me asking if I wanted their take on health reform. I somehow suspect that the PR flack concerned wasn't as familiar with the...

Pharma vs. Devices – FDA, Supreme Court and Liability Whiplash

By TOBIAS GILK Whiplash. I don’t know what else to call it when the US Supreme Court does a near 180° reversal on a decision from just a year ago on medical product liability. Consider the following… On February 20th,...

Jonathan Cohn on the internal politics of Obama's health care plan

By Matthew Holt Jonathan Cohn has started blogging almost daily on the politics of health care at The Treatment. And it's a treat to read. Jon is a member of the recently exposed vast left wing conspiracy (so am I,...

For whom the HITECH Bill Tolls?

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE As part of a sweeping effort to address the woes of the current US economy, the government has placed $19 billion on the table for HIT, aimed at containing healthcare costs and creating new jobs. The ultimate...

Bill Maher explains why government-run health care is a good idea!

By Matthew Holt Maher’s being funny (at least he thinks he is!), but he’s tapping into a meme that I think that many in DC including any Democrats are missing. I was watching CNN on Sunday and Sanjay Gupta brought...

A Sticky Solution to a Sticky Problem

By ALISTAIR ROCK “Don’t pull the knot tight,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once warned, “before being sure you have got hold of the right end.” Those who hope to sort out the tangle of health care spending would do well...

I shake my fist at Clay Shirky!

By Matthew Holt Last week (Tuesday to be precise) Chris Rauber, the health care journo at the SF Business Times calls me to talk about health care IT. But he ends with a question that’s not about Health care or...

Op-Ed: Pathway for FOBs Should Balance Need for Competition and Need for Innovation

By JAMES BIANCO MD President Obama's first budget calls for the creation of a regulatory pathway for the creation of follow-on, or biosmiliar, biologics. This is obviously now the most high-profile call yet to move forward with a system that...

Another Look: The Wal-Mart and E-ClinicalWorks Deal

By David E. Williams The New York Times reported this week (Wal-Mart Plans to Market Digital Health Records System) that the company’s Sam’s Club division will bundle eClinicalWorks electronic medical record software, Dell computers, installation, maintenance and training to offer...

Today's NEJM Hospitalist Study: What's the News?

By Bob Wachter A paper in today’s New England Journal proves what we all know – the hospitalist field is the only thing growing faster than the national debt. Even though that’s not news, this elegant biopsy of the Medicare...

Controlling Health Care Costs by Seduction

By PETER NESBITT The past failure of insurers and care providers to control medical costs challenges the Obama health care team to redesign health care to provide broader coverage while managing costs. If the past is any guide, they will...

ARRA: A New Era for Health IT, and for CCHIT – Part 1

By MARK LEAVITT  When President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law, health IT was catapulted into a new era. I believe this is -- and forever will be -- the biggest milestone in the...

The New Landscape of the Health Reform Debate

By Bill Kramer In the recent publicity about President Obama’s budget and health reform initiative, an important issue has not received enough attention. Most reporters, analysts, editorial writers and bloggers have focused on the proposed $634 billion reserve fund, the...

Is the Healthcare Economy Rightsizing?

By Brian Klepper and David C. Kibbe More than at any time in recent memory, powerful forces are buffeting the health care sector. We are in the midst of profound upheaval, driven by market and policy responses to the industry's...

Commentology

Carla was one of many commenters who wrote in response to insurance broker John Sinibaldi's thoughtful post on the role that he and his colleagues play in the current healthcare system. ("A Broker's Lament: We Brought This On Ourselves.") "To...

My forecast: a sad conclusion to the health care bubble...

Brian Klepper and David Kibbe have written a terrific piece on how and why health care is in a handbasket and wondering where it’s going. But as we ex-futurists know, there’s lots of luck required to make a good forecast....

Stimulus Modeling and Accountability

By JOHN HALAMKA As well all prepare for the work ahead, many in healthcare are beginning to model the potential payments and design the reporting systems needed to account for the money spent. I've promised to share all the Beth...

Health Affairs is all about IT

By Matthew Holt Most of the Health care geek squad is in DC as I write, at a press conference conducted by Health Affairs which has an entire issue out today about IT in health care. Here’s the table of...

The Role Speech Technology Can Play in Helping to Streamline the EHR Transition

By Keith Belton Early adopters – the approximately 15 percent of doctors who use an electronic health record (EHR) system successfully – are hitting a major speed bump ahead of their peers: EHRs can slow physicians down. Too much emphasis...

Better Records On Our Cars Than Ourselves?

By DOUG KLINGER Did you ever stop to think that many people probably have better service records for their cars than for their bodies and minds ? Having spent many years involved with the collection and management of health data...

Innovation + Economics: Keys to Successful Healthcare Reform

By Dr. Albert Waxman Now that the economic stimulus package has been negotiated and signed, healthcare is on deck. Not just for Congressional action, but also for the biggest wave of reform the industry has ever experienced. It *could* be...

A Broker's Lament: We Brought This On Ourselves

By JOHN SINIBALDI A huge segment of the American population is simply far too strapped to ever afford the premiums and costs associated with health insurance/health care as it is structured today. It isn't the employees of government (local, county,...

Online care....from Hawaii to Wall Street (journal only so far!)

By Matthew Holt Chris Lawton has an article in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal called (wait for it) Cough, Cough. Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? It’s a good general run down of American Well, TelaDoc & SwiftMD, which are...

Marketplace

Interested in reaching a national monthly audience of 75,000 healthcare-obsessed readers? Drop us a line. We'll get back to you with rates and options. Want to impress your boss and amaze your friends? Consider becoming a THCB corporate supporter. Classified:...

Five Recommendations for an ONC Head Who Understands Health IT Innovation

By David C. Kibbe, Brian Klepper and John Moore. Now that the legislative language of the HITECH Act -- the $20 billion health IT allocation within the economic stimulus package -- has been set, it's time to identify a National...