And in more from the "is it really bad enough out there to guarantee health reform?" front...
Pew Research is out with a poll showing that the numbers in favor of a major health care system reform are growing abut nowhere near as large as they were in 1993.
On the campaign trail Obama said that he would if elected cut the overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans by about $15bn a year. Once elected he confirmed that he would.
Stupid me thought that this would mean people on Wall Street would listen and that this freely available information would have been priced into the stocks. After all Bob Laszewski and I have been asking each other about this for quite some time!
So did I spend the last few weeks building up a big short position in the for-profit health insurers? No, this news was well known and already reflected in the stock price.
Just before I start today’s blog can you believe that someone bought my bobblehead of eBay for $47?………………………And I just found out who got it…..tell you that later. OK, do you remember the days when you came back from the mall with a new and shiny electrical appliance? And found it had been sold [...]
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 Congress that you need a bailout. Tell them you want to be the new alternative energy Manhattan Project, get the money, and then keep building SUVs and flying around in corporate jets.
To Congress, Daschle, and Obama, please don’t do this. Our industry, health care, combines the worst of the Big Three automakers with the worst of the hubris, dishonesty, and failure of the public trust of Wall Street. Please do not bail us out.
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 Congress that you need a bailout. Tell them you want to be the new alternative energy Manhattan Project, get the money, and then keep building SUVs and flying around in corporate jets.
To Congress, Daschle, and Obama, please don’t do this. Our industry, health care, combines the worst of the Big Three automakers with the worst of the hubris, dishonesty, and failure of the public trust of Wall Street. Please do not bail us out.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that hospitals could dramatically reduce the hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries they unintentionally cause patients ever year, but it may take a genius to coax change out of ossified organizations. As for getting hospitals to publicly disclose injuries and deaths the law says they must? That’s another story entirely.
On the good news front, The MacArthur Foundation has just honored Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Peter Pronovost with a “genius award,†the informal moniker for the go-and-do-smart-stuff prize given to MacArthur Fellows.
JAMA published an article Aug. 27 by Toronto doctors Michael Detsky and Edward Etchells called "Single-Patient Rooms for Safe Patient-Centered Hospitals." Abstract here. (As usual, JAMA does not allow free access to public policy articles. When will they start to do that, I wonder?)
Here's the summary:
Clinicians should advocate for single-patient rooms in any new hospital construction, expansion, renovation, or redesign. Single-patient rooms are permanent physical features that potentially could improve safety and patient satisfaction without the need for ongoing staff training, audits, or reminders. Money spent on capital costs to improve patient care may be more efficient than money spent on changing hospital culture and the behavior and attitude of health professionals. It is not necessary to wait 50 years for existing hospital structures to deteriorate before the full potential of single-patient rooms can be realized.
The health care issue has a history of being named by voters as one of the biggest problems we face -- until the problem de jour comes along and pushes it off the list. In 2008, that seems to be happening again with the economic downturn, the mortgage mess, and $4 gas surpassing health care as the big issues.
When asked to name the most important financial problem facing families today by the Gallup organization:
* 29% said energy and gas prices
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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: The Real Reason Why Healthcare Costs So Much, an examination of the economic forces driving the healthcare system. A fellow at the Century Foundation, Maggie is also the author the increasingly influential HealthBeat blog, one of our favorite healthcare reads, where this piece first appeared.
