The Health Care Blog

Op-Ed: Why "free market competition" fails in health care

By JOE FLOWER In trying to think about the future of health care, thoughtful, intelligent people often ask, “Why can’t we just let the free market operate in health care? That would drive down costs and drive up quality.” They...
November 3, 2009 in Economics, Marketplace, Reform | Permalink | Comments (32)

Saving Health Care, Saving America

By BRIAN KLEPPER, DAVID C. KIBBE, ROBERT LASZEWSKI and ALAIN ENTHOVEN So far, Congress' response to the health care crisis has been alarmingly disappointing in three ways. First, by willingly accepting enormous sums from health care special interests, our representatives...
October 30, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Corruption, Current Affairs, David Kibbe, Marketplace, Policy, Policy/Politics, primary care, Reform, The Industry, Transparency | Permalink | Comments (46)

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...
August 24, 2009 in Health 2.0, Marketplace, PHRs, Physicians, Podcasts, Policy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally, A Reasonable Plan for Certification of EHR Technologies

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER A caution to readers: This post is about methods for certifying Electronic Health Record (EHR) technologies used by physicians, medical practices, and hospitals who hope to qualify for federal incentive payments under the...
August 4, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, HHS, Marketplace, Meaningful Use, Policy, Policy/Politics, Reform, Technology, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (28)

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)

Health "reform": Lest we forget...

By Matthew Holt There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and b.s. discussed about the comparatively minor health reform that’s snaking its way through Congress. And when I say comparatively minor I mean it. Mostly because there’s lots this legislation doesn’t...
July 21, 2009 in Marketplace, Matthew Holt, Policy, Policy/Politics, Reform | Permalink | Comments (16)

Why Congress Should Consider Bob Laszewski's Health Care Affordability Model

By BRIAN KLEPPER Over the last few months, I have become increasingly disheartened over the prospects for meaningful health care reform. First, the process is terribly conflicted, and it shows. In the first quarter of 2009, the Center for Responsive...
July 9, 2009 in Affordability Model, Brian Klepper, Current Affairs, Marketplace, Policy, Policy/Politics, Reform, Robert Laszewski, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (40)

No Country for Old Men

By JEFF GOLDSMITH As we enter summer, the health reform process is moving into its Newtonian phase: irresistible forces meeting immovable objects. In both health cost and access, the trend is not our friend. There is ample evidence not only...
July 6, 2009 in Jeff Goldsmith, Marketplace, Medicare, Obama administration, Policy/Politics, Reform, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (57)

A Costly Wrinkle in the Merged Market

By CHARLIE BAKER One of the more controversial elements of health care reform in Massachusetts is the so-called “merged market.” In most states, individual health insurance is bought and sold under one set of rules, and small group insurance (for...
June 26, 2009 in Charlie Baker, Marketplace, Massachusetts, Reform | Permalink | Comments (20)

Bringing Patients into the Health IT Conversation About "Meaningful Use"

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER The Obama health team at HHS and ONC are gradually establishing the rules that will determine how approximately $34 billion in ARRA/HITECH funds are spent on health IT over the next several years....
May 21, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Consumers, David Kibbe, Electronic Medical Records, Google, Health 2.0, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Marketplace, Policy, Policy/Politics, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (35)

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. Calendar:...
May 16, 2009 in Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (0)

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...
March 30, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Health 2.0, Health Plans, Marketplace, primary care, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (15)

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...
March 16, 2009 in Health 2.0, Health Plans, Marketplace, Technology, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (23)

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...
March 12, 2009 in Brian Klepper, Current Affairs, David Kibbe, Economics, Health Plans, Marketplace, Medical Devices, Policy, Policy/Politics, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (33)

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,...
March 7, 2009 in Economics, Health Plans, Marketplace, Obama administration, Policy/Politics, Small Business, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (61)

Disruption breaking out over at Scott Shreeve's place

Clayton Christensen's publisher is pressing me to read The Innovators Prescription and then interview him. Sadly I haven’t had the time to pay the book the attention it deserves. Messrs Kuraitis & Kibbe already did a review on THCB and...
February 21, 2009 in Economics, HHS, Marketplace, Matthew Holt, Medicare, Scott Shreeve | Permalink | Comments (2)

Univita buys Enurgi (with a little explanation about the future of long-term care...)

By Matthew Holt Univita is a new play from a strong executive team led by former Anthem CEO Ben Lytle. Post Anthem, Lytle and his son Hugh founded Axia, a wellness company, and sold it to DM industry giant (albeit...
February 3, 2009 in Health 2.0, Marketplace, Matthew Holt | Permalink | Comments (1)

A whole lot more Medicaid, but there's a catch

By MATTHEW HOLT It looks like the stimulus package is going to spend a whole lot more on Medicaid AND subsidize the purchase of COBRA for laid off workers. Unlike the “let them eat cake” brigade who’ll decry this as...
January 28, 2009 in Marketplace, Policy, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (22)

CEOs' Urgent, Shared Commitment to Change

By Gary S. Kaplan A few weeks ago, I joined five of my peers in health care leadership throughout the country to help launch Health CEOs for Health Reform, a coalition dedicated to transforming health care and creating a more...
January 27, 2009 in Current Affairs, Marketplace, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (25)

Five "Shovel-Ready" Health Care Reforms

By Brian Klepper & David C. Kibbe Microsoft Health Vault's leader Peter Neupert has a wonderful blog post that makes two important points really well. One message is that health care reform is about the outcomes, not the technology. We...
January 21, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, evidenced-based medicine, Health Plans, Marketplace, Obama administration, Physicians, Policy, Policy/Politics, primary care, Quality, Technology, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (18)

Confessions of a Cultural Anthropologist: The Cause and Cure of High Health Costs

By Richard Reece Today’s medical students are being inducted into a culture in which their profession is seen increasingly in financial terms. Add in such pressures as the need to pay off enormous debts, and it is not surprising that...
January 13, 2009 in Marketplace, Physicians, primary care, Quality, Technology, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (13)

New NRC Report Finds "Health Care IT Chasm," Seeks New Course Toward Quality Improvement and Cost Savings

By DAVID C. KIBBE Like the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 2001 counterpart report, "Crossing the Quality Chasm," a new report from the National Research Council of the National Academies is complex, full of new ideas assembled from multiple disciplines, and...
January 12, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Marketplace, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (20)

Now, Sleepless in San Francisco

By Matthew Holt Having returned from Seattle, the persistent itching from the sand-fly bites of Roatan has awakened me at 5 a.m. So I’m commenting on three pieces of news, which I've commented on before here and at Spot-On. First,...
December 5, 2008 in Health 2.0, Health Plans, Hillary Clinton, Marketplace, Matthew Holt, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Policy, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fibroid Tumors: What You Need to Know

In her just published 8th book on women's health, Biologist Winnifred Cutler takes the terror out of fibroid tumors. In HORMONES AND YOUR HEALTH: A SMART WOMAN'S GUIDE TO HORMONAL AND ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES FOR MENOPAUSE, she writes: "Fibroids are about...
December 4, 2008 in Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (0)

Open Wide: Here comes the change you thought would never happen

By Jeff Goldsmith The morning after the election, I posted a speculative blog in Health Affairs on three possible scenarios for President-elect Obama’s implementing health reform: folding it into a bold, ambitious emergency legislative package (Complete the New Deal), carving...
November 25, 2008 in Economics, Election 08, Jeff Goldsmith, Marketplace, Obama, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (22)

Health care costs are crippling small businesses

By John Sinibaldi I've got news for the folks doing the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans' survey: Smaller businesses, especially those defined as true small businesses with two to 50 full-time employees, are strapped beyond belief when it comes...
November 25, 2008 in Health Plans, Marketplace, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Changes We Need

By Brian Klepper These are, as the Chinese curse reputedly called them, interesting times. If the burst of new Democratic health care reform proposals is any indication, a fresh breeze of the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" optimism is blowing...
November 18, 2008 in Brian Klepper, Marketplace, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (15)

Safeway uses incentives and transparency to improve employee health

By Scott Shreeve In this interview on “The Business Case for Health 2.0," Ken Shachmut, Senior VP Strategic Initiatives, Health Initiatives, and Health Re-engineering at Safeway, shares is thoughts on some of the highly impressive results that the company has...
October 29, 2008 in Marketplace, Policy, Scott Shreeve | Permalink | Comments (11)

The inconvenient truth

By Sarah Arnquist The Los Angeles Times ran a great series last week called "Shedding Risk" in which it detailed through compelling human stories the erosion of the health insurance market. It's definitely worth finding the time to read. Matthew...
October 29, 2008 in Health Plans, Marketplace, Policy | Permalink | Comments (12)

Millenson on McCain's Radical Health Care Plan

By Brian Klepper Over at the Huffington Post, Michael Millenson walks us through McCain's plan to end employer sponsored coverage, noting that it would apply faith-based economics to one seventh of the US economy, and pointing out that its as...
October 8, 2008 in Economics, Election 08, Health Plans, Marketplace, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (9)

Google Health: Is It Good For You?

By AMY TENDERICH Note: Amy Tenderich, who writes and maintains the wonderful Diabetes Mine, just did this very illuminating interview with Google Health's Missy Krassner. As you'll see, she doesn't slow-pitch to Missy. This is a sure-footed, tough-minded exchange about...
October 7, 2008 in Google, Health 2.0, Marketplace, Online Communities, Privacy, Quality, Technology, The Industry, User Generated Content, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

The problems with high-risk pools

By Robert Laszewski What do we do with people who are uninsurable because they have a pre-existing medical condition? That is a particularly important question as both McCain and Obama propose reforming American health care by building on the private...
August 1, 2008 in Election 08, Mandates, Marketplace, McCain, Obama, Robert Laszewski | Permalink | Comments (5)

The affordability factor must accompany discussions on health care coverage

By Charlie Baker Charlie Baker is the president and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., a nonprofit health plan that covers more than 1 million New Englanders. Baker blogs regularly at Let's Talk Health Care. I was in a...
July 31, 2008 in Charlie Baker, Economics, Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (42)

SEIU's questionable election strategy

By Paul Levy Several months ago, I mentioned the large sum of money being spent by SEIU on political races throughout the country. Now, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal questions the legality of the manner the SEIU is...
July 30, 2008 in Election 08, Marketplace, Paul Levy, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wal-Mart launches telemedicine business

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Leave it to Wal-Mart to continue to grow its franchise in health through yet another revenue center. This time it's telemedicine. The company will pilot telemedicine through retail clinics in Houston, and will be trademarked as Walk-In...
July 29, 2008 in Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Marketplace, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (1)

The result of the primary care crisis

By Matthew Holt Over at Spot-on I'm writing about the primary care crisis in partial response to the great stuff from Bob Wachter last week on THCB and also from Maggie Mahar and Brian Klepper. Hopefully, it's a primer for...
July 29, 2008 in Marketplace, Matthew Holt, Physicians, Policy, primary care | Permalink | Comments (10)

Marketplace: New magazine for "Amateuer Economists"

The online magazine Amateur Economists launched this month to explain the factors that influence how people and organizations make choices for non-economists. The expert writers will explore current economic issues their respective fields, such as health care, law, politics, literature...
July 21, 2008 in Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hospital rankings for positive press or for real?

By Sarah Arnquist Hospital & Health Networks magazine announced America's "100 Most Wired" hospitals for 2008 this week. You can compare this list to the list of "top hospitals," as recently ranked by U.S. News and World Report. Hospital &...
July 17, 2008 in Electronic Medical Records, Hospitals, Marketplace, Sarah Arnquist, Technology, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (2)

The managed care roller coaster

By Maggie Mahar & Niko Karvounis Niko Karvounis tracks the health care system for the Century Foundation. Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in the New York Times,...
July 16, 2008 in Health Plans, Hillary Clinton, Maggie Mahar, Marketplace, Policy, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (17)

Marketplace: Aloha, THCB

Maui AgeWave, a company working to expand the use of digital telehealth technologies to help people age in place, is in the early planning stages of a Maui Connected Care System ("MCCS") conference. If any of THCB readers would like...
July 14, 2008 in Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (0)

MARKETPLACE: Patient safety barbecue

LeapforPatientSafety.org is hosting a patient safety barbecue in Aiken South Carolina July 4 to commemorate Patient Safety Day. The organization also has an online petition requesting increased protection for physicians who complain to hospital administrators regarding poor quality patient care.
July 3, 2008 in Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congress votes for higher Medicare costs when voting down competition

By Sarah Arnquist Congress is bowing to pressure (read: financial contributions) from medical equipment makers that stand to lose money if Medicare expands its competitive bidding program. The NY Times reports today that the House approved legislation Tuesday that would...
June 25, 2008 in Economics, Marketplace, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (7)

Consumers seek health information to solve marketplace problems

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Consumers, employers, payers and providers agree that information flows are critical to helping stem health care costs. While there is shared concern about health care costs, there is also a shared desire for more, accessible information and...
June 24, 2008 in Consumers, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Marketplace, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (0)

Going Dutch for health reform ideas

By Maggie Mahar & Niko Karvounis Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Barron's and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven Medicine:...
June 22, 2008 in Economics, International, Maggie Mahar, Marketplace, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (12)

AMA endorses single-payer health care (sort of)

By Michael Millenson The American Medical Association has now added a second pillar to its national health care reform plan. The first pillar, of course, has always been “Don’t sue,” a sturdy principle that over the decades has led the...
June 21, 2008 in Health Plans, Marketplace, Policy/Politics, The Industry | Permalink | Comments (12)

MARKETPLACE: U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion seeks eHealth fellow

The Health Communication and ehealth Team in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) is seeking an ehealth Fellow. This fellowship is offered in collaboration with the Association for Prevention Teaching...
June 18, 2008 in Marketplace | Permalink | Comments (1)