The Health Care Blog

Transcript of Obama's Health Care Speech (and the GOP response)

Transcript of the GOP Response to Obama's Speech The full text of President Obama's address on health care to the Joint Session of Congress: --------- Madame Speaker, Vice President Biden, Members of Congress, and the American people: When I spoke...
September 7, 2009 in Congress, Obama administration, Reform, Videos | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our President is on the Ropes

By DR. STEPHEN KARDOS Recent pictures of President Obama suggest he is battered and on the ropes. Our President can recover if he chooses to change his fighting strategy to improve health instead of budgeting health. There is clearly emerging...
September 3, 2009 in Obama administration, Physicians, Reform | Permalink | Comments (39)

Op-Ed: Reform- Why have our objectives been abandoned?

By DR. ALBERT WAXMAN In the campaign of 2008 and the first six months of 2009, the call for healthcare reform has been a refreshing and important theme. It has been widely recognized that 1. Healthcare costs are out of...
July 22, 2009 in Congress, Obama administration, Policy/Politics, Reform | Permalink | Comments (23)

A Second City Warning to Obama

By MICHAEL MILLENSON For all those Obama-ites confident that they won't make the same mistakes pushing health care reform that the Clinton administration did, might I suggest a trip back home? Just a few minutes into the Second City comedy...
July 8, 2009 in Michael Millenson, Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (8)

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)

Washington Post’s “Salon” Disaster and Health Care Reform

By CRAIG STOLTZ As a former citizen of the Washington Post newsroom, the recent disaster about the newspaper’s “salon” project is heartbreaking and embarrassing. I won’t belabor the issues many others have so thoroughly covered, including today’s “apology” by publisher...
July 6, 2009 in Annals of Journalism, Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (5)

How Relevant is the American Medical Association?

By RAHUL PARIKH, MD Like most doctors, I was busy seeing a full schedule of patients when President Obama addressed members of the American Medical Association at their annual meeting in Chicago. The speech was billed as a crucial confrontation...
June 20, 2009 in Obama administration, Physicians, Policy/Politics, Reform | Permalink | Comments (19)

Beyond the Beltway – How Most of America Sees Health Reform

By BILL KRAMER What are people saying about health reform beyond the beltway and outside the health wonk debates? I’ve been meeting with Rotary Clubs and local Chambers of Commerce during the last several months, and they’re talking about different...
June 17, 2009 in Health Plans, Obama administration, Policy/Politics, Reform | Permalink | Comments (10)

The Health Industry's Achilles Heel

By BRIAN KLEPPER and DAVID C. KIBBE "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff Timing matters. The health industry has demonstrated steadfast resistance to reforms, but its recently diminished...
June 10, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, Health Plans, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, The Industry, Transparency | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Data-Driven Health Care: An Interview with Jerry Reeves, MD

An under-the-radar debate is occurring in health care between those who say data shows that practice variations across the land are “unwarranted” and those who maintain that such variation is inevitable given socioeconomic population differences and cost of practice differences...
June 8, 2009 in Dartmouth Atlas, Economics, evidenced-based medicine, Health Plans, Obama administration, Patient Safety, Physicians, Policy/Politics, primary care, Quality, The Industry, Transparency | Permalink | Comments (17)

MedPac on Steroids

By MAGGIE MAHAR Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in Barron's and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven medicine: The Real Reason Why healthcare costs so...
June 5, 2009 in Congress, Medicare, Obama administration, Policy, Reform, Senate Finance Committee | Permalink | Comments (13)

Reconciliation -- or War?

By ROGER COLLIER Reconciliation. It’s an odd word for something that could precipitate a knock-down, drag-out fight in Congress, but the process that Senate Democrats agreed last week to adopt if health care reform legislation isn’t passed by October 15...
May 18, 2009 in Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (9)

An Open Letter to the New National Coordinator for Health IT: Part 3 -- Certification As The Elephant in Health IT's Living Room

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER In the first and second parts of this series we talked about how and why there is no universal definition for the term "EHR." Instead there is a legitimate, growing debate about the...
May 8, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, e-patients, Electronic Medical Records, Health 2.0, Obama administration, Online Communities, Policy, Policy/Politics, Quality, Technology, The Industry, Transparency, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (20)

The Health IT Stimulus and FQHCs — Don’t Forget About Us!

By JAMES KAHN There is a critical element in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that targets funds for Federally-Qualified Community Health Centers (FQHCs). An FQHC is an organization defined by the Medicare and Medicaid statutes that receives funding...
May 7, 2009 in Electronic Medical Records, Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Public Plan--Mutual Assured Destruction?

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI I typically don’t talk about my travels on this blog but something happened this week that bears reporting. Whether the federal government should or should not offer a public health plan alternative to compete with private insurers...
April 20, 2009 in Health Plans, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics, Robert Laszewski | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack

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)

Comparing the effectiveness of comparative effectiveness research

By Sarah Arnquist An increased investment in comparative effectiveness research to gather additional evidence on what medical therapies and technologies work best is often cited as a fix for the nation’s rising health costs. Unfortunately, lessons from its use abroad...
March 3, 2009 in Economics, Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (2)

Divided we might get somewhere, but not yet

By MATTHEW HOLT The NY Times describes the Republican-less lobbyist meetings with Democrats that are allegedly getting towards a consensus on an individual mandate as the way to universal health care. Funnily enough some of those same groups (e.g. The...
February 20, 2009 in Election 08, Health Plans, Mandates, Matthew Holt, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (7)

Connecting the dots--Uninsured people are poor!

By MATTHEW HOLT A bunch of random articles all hit at once on Wednesday morning. And they win the John Madden award for stating the bleedingly obvious. This is kind of a companion piece to my rant about Friday's NY...
February 20, 2009 in Health Plans, Matthew Holt, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (10)

Please, do not ban reference-based pricing

By Rick Peters, MD & Karl Luber, MD We were stunned (yes, we're naïve and idealistic) to read in The Kaiser Family Foundation newsletter and The Wall Street Journal article last week that CMS (surprise) and the now former the...
January 25, 2009 in Economics, Medicare Advantage, Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rationing -- how will it be spun?

By Sarah Arnquist The House of Representatives' $825-billion stimulus package proposed last week included $1.1 billion to fund comparative effectiveness research -- research that evaluates two or more medical technologies or treatments to see which is most effective. This is...
January 23, 2009 in Obama administration, Physicians, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (11)

Nomination for U.S. Surgeon General

By Richard A. Lippin, MD This is a reprint of the letter originally posted to Facebook. Dear President Obama and Former Senator Tom Daschle: As a physician leader in the medical specialty Preventive Medicine for 30 plus years, I am...
January 23, 2009 in Obama administration, public health | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

Why It is Inevitable that the Debate over Health care Will be Partisan

By Maggie Mahar In a post earlier this week, Bob Laszewski reported that “the extension and expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) has now passed the full House and the Senate Finance Committee and is on its...
January 20, 2009 in Maggie Mahar, Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (8)

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)

Shocker--Karen Ignagni almost tells the truth

The NY Times' Robert Pear has an article on the politics of the Obama Administration introducing a public plan as part of FEHBP. As you might expect a boat load of Republicans who were told in grade school that private...
January 8, 2009 in Economics, Health Plans, Hospitals, Medicare Advantage, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (21)

Let's Reboot America's HIT Conversation Part 1: Putting EHRs in Context

By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER Kibbe & Klepper are back with an update to their pre-Christmas piece on EHRs and the forthcoming Obama Administration's investment policy towards them. Lest you think that this is just a small group...
January 5, 2009 in Brian Klepper, David Kibbe, Health 2.0, Obama administration, Policy, Policy/Politics, The Industry, Transparency, User Generated Content, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (7)

Is Massachusetts a model for national reform?

By Charlie Baker I get asked this question a lot these days, which shouldn’t be that surprising. Harvard Pilgrim is headquartered in Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts health care reform plan is already a couple of years old. More importantly, it...
December 30, 2008 in Charlie Baker, Medicare, Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (18)

Washington, Please Don't Bail Out the Health Care Industry

By RICK PETERS A health care Marshall Plan -- $50 Billion stimulus to get electronic health records (EHRs) in every doctor’s hands or $50,000 to each physician -– what an incredible marketing job. Detroit, are you listening? Stop whining to...
December 19, 2008 in Economics, Electronic Medical Records, Obama administration, Physicians, Policy, Quality, Technology | Permalink | Comments (45)

An Open Letter to the Obama Health Team

By David C. Kibbe & Brian Klepper It seems likely that the Obama administration and Congress will spend a significant amount on health IT by attaching it as a first-order priority to the fiscal stimulus package. We take the President-elect...
December 19, 2008 in Obama administration, Physicians, Technology, The Industry, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (48)

The Inevitability of Health Care Reform: This Time, the Politics Have Changed

By Michael Millenson Rummaging through my extensive files (i.e., drawers of paper), I came across this January/February 2001 issue of Healthplan, the magazine of the old American Association of Health Plans before it gobbled up the Health Insurance Association of...
December 17, 2008 in Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (8)

On Health Care Reform Stimulating the Economy: The Massachusetts Example

By Maggie Mahar Recently, a somewhat starry-eyed op-ed in the New York Times suggested that a $100 billion annual investment in universal health care is just the medicine that our economy needs. The goal, declared Jonathan Gruber, a professor of...
December 14, 2008 in Economics, Maggie Mahar, Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (11)

Slicing the health reform pie

By Robert Laszewski I doubt anyone would disagree with the statement that America’s health care costs are too high, continue to grow at an unsustainable rate, and reform is critical to control costs, get everyone covered, and improve quality. In...
December 12, 2008 in Economics, Medicare Advantage, Obama administration, Policy/Politics, Robert Laszewski | Permalink | Comments (15)

Electronic Medical Records and Obama's Economic Plan

By John Halamka On Dec. 6, President-elect Obama announced the three major pillars of his economic recovery plan: rebuild our roads/bridges, enhance our schools including broadband, and deploy electronic health records for every clinician and hospital in the U.S. I...
December 12, 2008 in Electronic Medical Records, Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (31)

Plus Ca change.gov. . .

By CRAIG STOLTZ I’ve previously whined that it’s going to be a lot harder for President Obama to take advantage of social media than it was for the Obama campaign to do so. I’m afraid to report that proof is...
December 8, 2008 in Craig Stoltz, Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (5)

Presidential Rx for Health

By Susan Blumenthal and Yi-An Ko Past U.S. presidents have provided innovative leadership that shaped the landscape for our national health and science institutions. President Lincoln established the National Academy of Sciences. President Truman's foreign policies inspired the creation of...
December 2, 2008 in Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (4)

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)

Despite Democratic control, major health reform still unlikely

By Robert Laszewski With 258 House and 57 Senate Democrats, it's almost certain that major health reform will be passed, right? Actually, that was the number of Democrats Bill Clinton started off with in 1993 and we know what happened...
November 8, 2008 in Obama administration, Policy/Politics | Permalink | Comments (19)

Health care information technology in an early Obama Administration

By John Halamka When Obama takes office in January, the economy will be his first priority, followed by the war in Iraq. Health care will follow as his next major issue to address. What will he do? I imagine he'll...
November 7, 2008 in Electronic Medical Records, Obama administration, Technology | Permalink | Comments (4)

Now, a real bipartisan opportunity in health care exists

By Robert Laszewski President-Elect Obama, and about every candidate for Congress, has said he wants to change the partisan tone in Washington. Obama, the Democratic Congressional leadership, and the Republicans have a terrific opportunity to do just that on health...
November 6, 2008 in Election 08, Obama administration, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2)

Health in an Obama world -- what we know so far

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn We know the name of the 44th President of the United States: Barack Obama. As the next President's supporter Oprah Winfrey is known to ask, "What do you know for sure?" When it comes to health, there...
November 6, 2008 in Obama administration | Permalink | Comments (8)