The Health Care Blog

Pay (Only) for Health Care that Works

Charles Silver & David A. Hyman Health care is expensive partly because governmental payers and insurers foot the bill for large quantities of medical services that are ineffective, unnecessary, or unproven. According to a RAND report, studies of clinical efficiency...
November 11, 2009 in Congress, Costs, Health Plans, Policy, Reform | Permalink | Comments (30)

Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Health Care Debate

By Greg Rienzi, Staff writer for the Johns Hopkins Gazette While concepts for health care reform volley back and forth in Washington, D.C., and around the nation, Johns Hopkins has quietly but meaningfully injected itself into the debate. Johns Hopkins...
November 5, 2009 in Costs, Policy, Reform | Permalink | Comments (10)

A “Third School” of Cost Containment?

By BILL KRAMER Is there a “Third School” of reformers that could help us resolve the long debate about how to contain health care spending? Drew Altman’s recent column describes the history of the debate between the “Regulators” and the...
November 2, 2009 in Costs, Reform | Permalink | Comments (7)

Pop the Cost Bubble: Unallot Medicare

By Victor M. Sandler, MD Here’s a dirty little secret: Cutting health care costs is not that difficult, nor will it harm patients. That’s because it only involves giving up unnecessary medical care—tests and treatments patients may want but really...
October 5, 2009 in Costs, Medicare | Permalink | Comments (7)

Carrot or Stick? Should Patient Decision Aids Be Rewarded or Required?

By DON KEMPER Should we incent or require providers to prescribe patient decision aids? Should we incent or require consumers to use patient decision aids? Overtreatment is the most celebrated cause of runaway health care costs, but we shouldn’t blame...
October 1, 2009 in Costs, Patients, Physicians | Permalink | Comments (6)

A Remedy for Healthcare Organizations

By PAUL LUNDY, VP, Xerox Global Services The switch to electronic health records can be a daunting task. To make the shift less painful, healthcare organizations should first consider taking control the number of documents flowing through the organization –...
September 23, 2009 in Costs, EHR | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Reform" Means Higher Costs, Not Lower

By JOE FLOWER A reader asks: "If the current bill passes are my health insurance costs likely to go up, down, or remain about the same?" If the form that I believe most likely to pass actually passes (insurance reforms,...
September 21, 2009 in Costs, Health Plans, Reform | Permalink | Comments (4)

Commentology: Improving Cost-Containment

Stephen J. Motew writes: Surgical specialists practice under a slightly more regimented reimbursement model predominantly due to the global period payment for surgical procedures. The total care of the surgical patient for any procedure, including pre-op evaluation, the procedure itself,...
September 15, 2009 in Commentology, Costs, Disease Management, EHR | Permalink | Comments (4)

Getting Rid of “Friction” in Health Care

By FLETCHER LANCE Friction occurs when an object moving through space encounters resistance, slows down and has its forward energy diverted. In the world of health care, friction is a term that has become synonymous with paperwork. Today, the U.S....
September 4, 2009 in Costs, Electronic Medical Records, Technology | Permalink | Comments (10)

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...
August 26, 2009 in Costs, GOP, Malpractice, Reform, Robert Laszewski | Permalink | Comments (26)

Commentology

Reader Murry Ferris writes in: I am a 65 year old retired ad exec and also an insulin-dependent diabetic. I have other medical complications, but taking care of the diabetes is the big one. Every day I test my blood...
August 6, 2009 in Chronic conditions, Commentology, Costs | Permalink | Comments (3)

Are “Cadillac” health plans the problem?

By BILL KRAMER The debate over proposals to tax health insurance plans is confusing and frustrating. The proposals are usually described as a tax on “gold plated” or “Cadillac” health coverage. According to the media and many spokespeople on the...
August 4, 2009 in Costs, Health Plans, Reform, Taxes | Permalink | Comments (9)

Explaining Runaway Costs: The Lobster or the Salad?

By BOB WACHTER Have you found yourself ‘splaining to friends and family why the healthcare system is so damn expensive? I’ve been teaching health policy for a couple of decades, and I’m surprised that my two favorite stories haven’t yet...
July 28, 2009 in Bob Wachter, Comparative Effectiveness Research, Consumers, Costs | Permalink | Comments (52)

The Case for Price Ceilings for Health Services

BY DAVID HANSEN Most in the current health reform debate agree on the need to curtail health care costs. Despite this, few discuss directly how health services are priced, though clearly this a central issue. Prices have both immediate impacts...
July 27, 2009 in Costs, Managed Care, Marketplace, Medicare, Reform | Permalink | Comments (48)

Return to McAllen: A Father-Son Interview

By IAN ROBERTSON KIBBE By now, Dr. Atul Gawande's article on McAllen's high cost of health care has been widely read. The article spawned a number of responses and catalyzed a national discussion on cost controls and the business of...
July 26, 2009 in Costs, David Kibbe, McAllen, Physicians | Permalink | Comments (31)

The Case for Home Health Care

By Dr. George Taler While Congress is debating health reform and struggling to accomplish the apparently competing goals of reducing costs while improving quality, I am part of a program that does both. As co-director of the Washington Hospital Center’s...
July 25, 2009 in Chronic conditions, Congress, Costs, Home Health Care, Long Term Care, Medicare, Physicians, primary care, Reform | Permalink | Comments (8)

Costs v Coverage: Krugman gets it--Brooks is almost quite close

By Matthew Holt So Paul Krugman, the NY Times Nobel Prize winning lefty columnist, says this (and echoes what I’ve been saying for a while) So where in America is there serious consideration of moving away from fee-for-service to a...
July 24, 2009 in Costs, Matthew Holt, New York Times, Policy, Policy/Politics, Reform | Permalink | Comments (10)

Patient, Heal Thyself

By DON KEMPER If you want a better system, support a smarter patient . For weeks now Congress has been stymied by how to pay for extending coverage to the uninsured. While it may seem stupid to look to the...
July 23, 2009 in Costs, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Technology | Permalink | Comments (58)

Op-Ed: Healthcare Reform Lessons From Mayo Clinic

By LEONARD L. BERRY and KENT D. SELTMAN Three goals underscore our nation's ongoing healthcare reform debate:1) insurance for the uninsured, 2) improved quality, and 3) reduced cost. Mayo Clinic serves as a model for higher quality healthcare at a...
July 21, 2009 in Costs, Mayo Clinic, Patient Safety, Quality, Reform | Permalink | Comments (44)

Eliminating Medication Waste in Long-Term Care Can Help the White House Pay for its Health Plan

By CARLA CORKERN The news of an $80 billion White House deal with drug companies to lower Medicare drug costs targets $30 billion in savings for consumers covered by Medicare Part D, but the sources of the remaining $50 billion...
July 14, 2009 in Costs, Long Term Care, Medicare, pharmaceuticals | Permalink | Comments (26)

Costs Are Not The Same As Rates

By PAUL LEVY Many "old" media outlets do not identify the authors of their editorials. Thus, when an opinion is offered, you have no way of knowing who wrote it or what their qualifications are. Your only recourse when there...
July 13, 2009 in Costs, Paul Levy, Policy/Politics, Transparency | Permalink | Comments (13)

The Case for Comparative Effectiveness Research

By RAHUL PARIKH MD When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, there was this local TV show my dad used to enjoy watching called Fight Back with David Horowitz. Basically, Horowitz, a TV reporter and consumer advocate,...
July 13, 2009 in Comparative Effectiveness Research, Costs, JAMA, Rahul Parikh | Permalink | Comments (6)

Musings on Payment Reform

By CHARLIE BAKER Charlie Baker is the president and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim, a nonprofit health plan that covers more than 1 million New Englanders. Charlie is a regular contributor to THCB, where he has authored posts on national health...
July 12, 2009 in Charlie Baker, Costs, Massachusetts, primary care, Quality, Reform | Permalink | Comments (38)

The Affordability Model

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Most health care experts agree the reason our system is so unaffordable is because of all of the waste and unnecessary care—up to 30% of what we spend. I will suggest that it will take the genius...
July 8, 2009 in Affordability Model, Costs, Policy, Reform, Robert Laszewski | Permalink | Comments (28)

Three Initiatives to Reduce Costs and Increase Health Care Efficiencies

By DALE H. YAMAMOTO Two major objectives underlying all current health care reform proposals are to reduce health care costs and to improve the quality of health care delivery. In my recent essay, part of the Society of Actuaries’ new...
July 8, 2009 in Costs, Physicians, Reform | Permalink | Comments (6)

Op-Ed: It's the Waste, Stupid.

By MICHAEL PAINTER A recent Wall Street Journal editorial strongly challenged the notion that there is enormous waste in American health care. In the article the editors acknowledge that dramatic variation in health care spending exists across the country--but point...
June 12, 2009 in Costs, Medicare, Wall Street Journal | Permalink | Comments (6)