The Health Care Blog

The Health Care Cost Shifting Myth

By AUSTIN FRAKT There is a pervasive notion that providers of health care can make up for lower payments received from one set of payers (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, uncompensated care) by increasing prices charged to other payers (e.g. private insurance...

Separating Fact from Fiction and Health from Health Care

By JAMES S. MARKS, ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON FOUNDATION In an editorial on Wednesday, The New York Times debunks the often-cited claim that America has the best health care system in the world. For the politicians who routinely use this as...

Advice For State REC Planners

By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER On August 20th, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and ONC head David Blumenthal announced $598 million in grants to set up about 70 "regional extension centers" (RECs) that will help physicians select and implement...

Impact of EHRs on Medical Education

By GLENN LAFFEL Author's Note: This the second of a 5-part series whose purpose it is to make the case for implementing a widespread, systematic approach to HIT education in medical schools and continuing medical education programs for physicians. A...

Congressman Mike Rogers' opening statement on Health Care reform in Washington D.C.

THCB Classified: HIPAA Webinars-on-demand

The passing of the HITECH Act of 2009 mandated additional guidelines for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). On August 24, 2009 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued interim Security Breach Notification rules mandating compliance...

Expect to hear a whole lot about this...

By Matthew Holt Seniors care about death panels (apparently) but they usually really care about drug prices and costs. Part of the political rationale for the Republicans passing Medicare drug coverage in 2003 was to deny the Democrats the ability...

Here We Go Again - Again

By RICK PETERS Last Friday morning, delirious, wasted, bone tired, driving home from the Emergency Room at 8AM in my beat-up little truck with only one speaker working. Amid all of us awash in the blogosphere thank the stars for...

“Meaningful Use” Criteria as a Unifying Force

By Vince Kuraitis, David C. Kibbe & STEVE ADAMS Over the past several years, many diverse initiatives have arisen offering partial solutions to systemic problems in the U.S. health care non-system. We see Meaningful Use Criteria recommended by the HIT...

Health Reform Bills Would Be Great For the Business Of Health Care

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Editors Note: This piece by veteran THCB contributor, Robert Laszewski, first appeared on Kaiser Health News. The piece is republished here with permission. Have you noticed how none of the big health care business special interests is...

What can $100 get you?

By Matthew Holt I don’t use THCB much to point out what good we all can do—I keep that for my year-end letter—but my favorite charity (Saigon’s Childrens Charity) is at its financial year end and just sent me the...

We'll be back here in 2016, unless

By Matthew Holt I've been meaning for a while to put up a common sense post that points out that if we don't do reform now, we’ll end up with cost at close to $30K per family as opposed to...

Innovation and Absence of Evidence vs. Evidence of Absence

By Joshua Seidman Jon Gabel from the National Opinion Research Center has an excellent op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. The basic argument is summarized in his conclusion: “The Congressional Budget Office’s integrity is beyond questioning. But the record...

"Money driven medicine" on PBS tonight

By Matthew Holt Tonight the documentary based on Maggie Mahar's book Money-Driven Medicine is on Bill Moyers’ show on PBS. Meanwhile if you haven’t seen this clip of Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn seriously suggesting to a completely desperate woman...

Can a Collection of Official Statements Be Called a “Blog”?

By Michael L. Millenson American Medical Association president, J. James Rohack has begun sharing his thoughts on the U.S. health care system, health reform and other issues affecting patients and physicians in a new blog, according to the AMA. There’s...

Health Care Reform's Deeper Problems

By BRIAN KLEPPER and DAVID C. KIBBE Congress' health care reform debate has highlighted how American governance is broken and the difficulty of addressing our national problems. Take, for example, whether health care is in crisis at all. Conservative commentators...

U.S. v. Europe -- What's Your Risk of Dying?

By MERRILL GOOZNER Want to have some fun with numbers? Check out a brand new "Death Risk Rankings" website, which was sent my way today by Dr. Paul Fischbeck of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He and his colleagues have...

There Will Not Be Health Care Reform in 2009...

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI ...without Republican leadership. I will suggest that there is an opportunity for the Republicans to score a huge political and policy win. It can be done in a bipartisan way and it can be done in a...

The HIT Deluge Part I: The Need and the Opportunity

By GLENN LAFFEL There was a time--not too long ago, in fact-- when it seemed safe and reasonable to define health information technology narrowly: the acronym encompassed the management of health information and its secure exchange between patients, providers, and...

Faces of the Fallen

By ALICIA SAMUELS & ANDREA CARLSON GIELEN What do Hillary Clinton, Pope Benedict XVI, Barbara Mikulski and Sonia Sotomayor have in common? Falls. (And no, this is not a joke). In fact, falls are far from a laughing matter. Approximately...

Donald Light sticks it to PhRMA and Tauzin, again

By Matthew Holt Over the years PhRMA must be getting pretty sick of Univ of Medicine and Denistry of New Jersey Professor Donald Light. He’s made a cottage industry of pissing on the commonly-trumpeted propaganda that only American drug research...

SXSW--Vote for me, or those other guys!

By Matthew Holt So in Austin every year they have this SXSW conference. Indu goes every year and raves about it. Last year Jay Drayer from CareFlash put me on a panel (but it didn’t get selected). This year he...

Commentology: Healthcare in the UK

Rod Unger writes: I am, if you like, Joe the Plumber living here in the UK just to the North of London. I have no particular political mandate in terms of the NHS (more of this later). I don’t work...

Data drives decisions? Crowd-sourcing as the future of research

By Matthew Holt So, I get back from lounging on the beach in Hawaii to find that two strands of the THCB and Health 2,0 worlds have connected! At the Health 2.0 Conference we’re going to be hearing from 23andme,...

Death Panels, Palliative Care, and the Dangers of Modern McCarthyism

By BOB WACHTER It’s time to fight back. The “death panel” nonsense is not a harmless and amusing political canard – it is modern McCarthyism: the shameless, heinous use of lies and distortions to scare and confuse people. The tide...

Cool Technology of the Week

By JOHN HALAMKA Before my trip to Japan, I attended the New England Healthcare Institute Medication Adherence Expert Roundtable on Thursday July 23rd, 2009. The purpose of the roundtable was to prioritize activities that would encourage patients to be more...

Interview with Al Waxman, Psilos Group

Al Waxman is a healthcare entrepreneur who these days runs the Psilos Group, a venture firm that invests in health care services, health care IT and device and instrumentation companies. Among their better known investments are Active Health Management, Health...

Not Just Personal Responsibility

By RAHUL PARIKH Off and on during the current health reform debate, politicians, leaders and pundits have raised the issue personal responsibility. For instance, take these comments from the John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods: “…many of our health-care...

Commentology: Thoughts on the Death of Primary Care

Vance Harris MD writes: We are our own worst enemies, as we have allowed insurance companies and Medicare to set the value of our services. Clearly those values they impose have nothing to do with our contribution to the health...

Why Standards Matter (1): The True Meaning of Interoperability

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER Americans are generally skeptical of words that otherwise intelligent and articulate people can't pronounce. "Interoperability," like nu-cu-lar, is one of these. After a while, these words can take on a mystique all their...

Neither Quick Nor Easy

By THOMAS L. GREANEY The idea of establishing regional cooperatives, advanced as an alternative to President Obama’s public plan option, has attracted attention as a means of assuring that health reform legislation contains some means to improve competition among health...

The opposite of that bridge to nowhere

By MICHAEL PAINTER An elderly family member recently received a devastating cancer diagnosis. She gets her care in California from a team of health professionals in a large integrated delivery system. We're supposed to be reassured that her care team...

Science Is Leading Us to More Answers, but It's Also Misleading Us

By DAVID SHAYWITZ Be careful what you wish for. That is the unexpected lesson of the past decade of biomedical research, which has been characterized by an overwhelming abundance of interesting things to study and powerful ways to study them....

Health Care Reform: What do People Really Want?

By HUMPHREY TAYLOR Humphrey Taylor is Chairman of The Harris Poll. Prior to joining Harris, Taylor worked in Britain where he conducted all of the private political polling for the Conservative Party and was a close adviser to Prime Minister...

Are Cooperatives a Reasonable Alternative to a Public Plan?

By TIMOTHY S. JOST First, a word about history. We have tried cooperatives before. During the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of the cooperative movement in the United States, the Farm Security Administration encouraged the development of health cooperatives. At...

Mississippi, Alabama – and the winner is!

By BRIAN BAUM A study was released last month by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation titled: “F is for Fat 2009”. The essence of the report once again raised the apparent hopelessness of our...

A Town Hall Meeting 3000 Miles from Washington, DC

By BILL KRAMER Seaside, Oregon, is about as far away from Washington, DC, as you can get in the continental U.S. Not quite 3000 miles, but almost (2860 to be exact). And it seemed very far away from the sound...

Barney Frank deals with the loonies

By Matthew Holt This is just too funny not to show you all.

Interview: Bob Wachter on reform, safety, primary care and everything

One of the best commentators around on the issues of patient safety, health care quality and basically everything to do with health care organizations is UCSF Professor Bob Wachter. Bob has been in the trenches as one of the leaders...

Announcement: Money-Driven Medicine on DVD

Academy-award-winning documentary film producer Alex Gibney (Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room, and Taxi to the Dark Side) has made a 90-minute documentary based on THCB contributor Maggie Mahar’s book Money-Driven Medicine. Bill Moyers will be showing a shorter...

The Town Hall Effect

By HARRIS MEYER We’ve all been reading a lot about the congressional town hall meetings around the country, where protesters rail about President Obama’s health reform plan. News reports and video clips indicate that half or more of the protesters...

Ditching the Public Option

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI It looks to me like the popular objections to a health care bill being expressed by voters this month are concentrated in two primary areas: A concern about “government control of the health care system”—mostly around the...

EHRs and Multi-Provider Use: Lessons from the VA

By AUSTIN FRAKT With billions of dollars of stimulus funds available and the President and state governors promoting them, electronic health records (EHRs) are likely to become commonplace in the U.S. health care system. To be sure the transition will...

Medical Data in the Internet “cloud” (part 2) – Data security

By ROBERT ROWLEY, MD This is the second of a 3-part series, where we dig a little deeper into the questions of medical data in the Internet “cloud.” In the first part, we reviewed issues of data safety – how...

I am shocked, shocked that Rick Scott would twist the truth

By Matthew Holt Surprise, surprise, the British women who appear in the so-called Conservatives for Patients’ (so-called) Rights” propaganda are complaining that their words were twisted completely out of context. 'We were duped': Two British women tricked into become stars...

Enthoven's ABCDs and why that socialist Gingrich is wrong on standardized benefits

By Matthew Holt Here's Alain Enthoven's four part plan for fixing healthcare. As THCB regulars might guess, it's familiar and very sensible stuff. (Here’s the PDF) A. Create an exchange with standardized plans, make individuals buy through the exchange and...

Will Hospital Stocks’ Rally Continue?

By DON JOHNSON Since early July, most hospital companies’ stocks have been rallying in anticipation of relief from uncompensated care costs under proposed health insurance reform bills. On Wednesday, however, profit taking hit the stocks in a small way. The...

Voices from the deserving mob

By Matthew Holt From the (UK) Independent. Real quotes from real people attending the free care in LA this week: "I had a gastric bypass in 2002, but it went wrong, and stomach acid began rotting my teeth. I've had...

Urgent Care Required

By DANIEL GILDEN Congressional testimony, government reports and national newspapers frequently reference the cost of Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse at upwards of $60 billion dollars a year. Typical examples point to criminal activity such as submitting claims from...

Shocking Google Health Back to Life

By SCOTT SHREEVE, MD I hope to use this post to motivate my good friends at Google Health into taking a much more public, visible, and proactive role in the health conversation. More importantly, it is a call to Google...