Yes, yes, yes……….here I go again moaning again about flying. You see, this morning I booked my tickets to fly to Trieste and your Carnival Dream and this means that I once again have to experience the IKEA of the airline industry………Ryan Scare. Sorry………Ryan Air. Yes I know Carnival are paying for my flight but [...]
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 previous post reviewed challenges posed by the HIT Deluge.
Countries around the world are racing to digitize patient medical records. In the US for example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allocated $21 billion to an incentive program designed to encourage the “meaningful use” of such systems.
(more...)
There is a pervasivenotion 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 companies). To the extent it occurs cost shifting offsets attempts to control overall health care costs throughreducedfees paid by public insurers. It makes "bending the cost curve" harder.
However,it is a myth that providers can fully shift costs. That they could do so violates, in most cases, principles of economics. Moreover, empirical evidence suggests cost shifting, where it occurs, is done so a minimal level: only a small fraction of decreased payments by public payers shows up as an increase in charges to private payers. Losses associated with one payer are largely not recouped from another.
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 to bundle seniors’ desire for drug coverage with a universal coverage bill. So far the Republicans have to say the least muddied the waters as to whether universal coverage is a good thing for Medicare recipients—or at least the ones that don’t care about their kids or grand-kids.
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 NPR and professional journalism. Steve Inskeep, from Morning Edition was interviewing Angela Braly, CEO of Wellpoint. Perfect! Wellpoint is the largest health insurer in the U.S. in terms of covered lives. Also, Wellpoint, the former non-profit Blue Cross of California converted into a very profitable for-profit corporation, represents the epitome of for-profit medicine.
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 reports for the kidsI support. I’ve asked people who want to talk to me in the past to “buy a kid a bike.” And as it’s late on a Friday and I’m about to go out and take my wife to dinner, I thought you might all think about alternate uses for the $100 I’m about to spend (Yes, she’s a cheap date). Here’s what $100 buys for a very, very poor kid in Vietnam (and because of the recession donations are off this year, so they need more help).
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 the $15K as they are now, and in turn that will mean 80–100 million uninsured as opposed to 50–60 million we have now,and of course the end result will be a health care industry that looks like General Motors.
But luckily Joe Paduda just wrote the post for me and added a date—go read at Managed Care Matters.
CALL FOR PAPERS
3rd International Conference on
The History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA 2010)
To be held in Singapore
22-25 June 2010
to coincide with IAHA 2010 (International Association of Historians of Asia)
Organised by:
Department of History, STS Research Cluster & Asia Research Institute (ARI) National University of Singapore
With support from:
The National University of Singapore
I recently learned of the publication of the inaugural issue of Eä – Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science and Technology.
The journal is electronic, peer-reviewed, and open-access. These are a few of myfavorite things, and the first issue looks terrific. Ihave every intention of submitting some work to the journal in the near future,and Ihope interested readers support the fledgling journal -- interdisciplinary, intercontinental, multilingual, all things a medical humanitiespublication ought to endorse, IMO.
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 one problem: the AMA presidency is an elected position whose occupant has roughly the same freedom of expression as a senior Iranian clergyman or a member of Vladimir Putin’s cabinet. The AMA, so virulent for so many years in opposition to the group practice of medicine, yields to no one in its practice of group consensus medical politics. All communications by AMA officers and board members are strictly scripted to adhere to official positions.
