Shiftwise wants to become the Travelocity or the Orbitz of the nurse staffing business by bringing web-based solutions to a field that has been dominated for years by agencies using outdated technology. By allowing HR managers to match available staff and allowing staff to bid for available shifts, the company says its technology allows hospitals — and agencies too — to save big bucks on the process of dealing with temporary staffing. I had a chat with founder Jason Lander about the company’s model and plans for the future.
HEALTH PLANS: Mega Life and Health — Time to call AHIP, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and BlackStone out
I spent a little time last year on the issue of Mega Life and Health. There’s only one term for this company, and what’s really frightening is that it’s a major player in AHIP. If AHIP is ever going to get itself out of the self-serving position it’s in and transition to being an organization of responsible private health plans that can have a reasonable conversation about the positive role health plans can play , the plans who could live in a future of community rating need to leave, or jettison the scumbags like Mega.
What’s the activity I’m so upset about?
Mega Life and Health sells health insurance door to door to poor to middle and low income working people. They claim that they are selling a product which their customers understand. But the point their customers clearly do not understand is that the insurance has severe limits on what it pays, especially what it pays per day in cases of expensive care. So if a policyholder gets sick and needs hospital care, Mega only pays out a fraction of what the hospital charges, leaving the poor sucker patient on the hook for the rest. Last year the California Supreme Court ruled that this con, like all the best cons, is legal. And this type of policy continues to be sold (more or less legally) in most states.
TECH: PHR of cool
Here’s first press release I’ve seen claiming a PHR that works on your iPhone (from MedeFile). Having said that, as Apple advertises the iPhone as delivering the Internet (not a scaled down version) then presumably any web-accessible PHR is accessible on an iPhone, no?
POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: John Cohn puts the boot in….nicely
I told John Cohn a while back that he was just too nice, and that he shouldn’t engage in the pointless argument with the free-marketeers about whether we treat cancer better or worse than the Europeans—especially as we do so much worse on many other measures. But John doesn’t listen to me—instead he takes the cancer argument and uses it to stamp all over the free-marketeers. At some point the referee should step in and stop this fight…
Meanwhile here’s the real problem. Next to John’s article on the CBS site is a video of Bush, and this is the text below it:
CBS News RAW: President Bush announced new proposals for the tax code intended to improve health care. His ideas counter Democratic proposals to nationalize the system.
Please could someone at CBS or anywhere else find me an example of a democrat wanting to “nationalize” the system. “Nationalize” means the government owning the production/service a la the Post Office or UK NHS. Not even Dennis Kucinich seems to be in favor of that. So what the hell are they talking about? I don’t know but neither do they. And, as they’re controlling a major news organization’s output, that is the problem.
HEALTH PLANS/HOSPITALS: Kaiser’s tame blogger at it again
I think that most of the latest fines for Kaiser, which are only vaguely related to its original problems at the kidney transplant unit and are for poor performance of peer review and handling complaints at its hospitals are generally much ado about nothing. I got quoted by Barbara Feder in the SJ Mercury News saying as much.
This does not, though, absolve Kaiser for not coming fully clean about what happened with the kidney transplant scandal, and for its reticence in having anyone at TPMG talk about it. That’s still the elephant in its living room that both KP and the Dept of Managed Health Care are ignoring.
PHYSICIANS/POLICY: NY Times discovers that FFS is a bad idea
Healthcare 101 from Alex Berenson at the NY Times–Fee for service is a bad idea. Not exactly advanced stuff, but at least it’s better than nothing.
PODCAST: Kelsey-Seybold tries to reinvent direct contracting
Kelsey-Seybold, the big multi-specialty group in Houston, TX, has plunged into direct contracting with employers in recent years. You wouldn’t expect that type of activity in Texas from a physician group, so I talked to Dr Patrick Carter, the medical director, managed care to find out more. Here’s the interview
POLICY: Are they that stupid, really?
Apparently the Administration is going to follow up on their threat to go after Michael Moore for his Sicko stunt of taking patients to Cuba.. This should give Sicko, which did OK for a documentary but not exactly Farenheight 911 numbers, a bit of a life at the box office.
But can the Bush Administration really be that stupid? (This is a rhetorical question, BTW)
POLICY: Great new site–Health08.org, and more on health IT in the election
Health08.org – Health care election news, analysis and events from KFF.
And it’s the baby of someone THCBers know and love but we can’t identify in public because the individual concerned used to have opinions, and KFF isn’t allowed to have them, let alone act on them—unlike the plethora of right wing think tanks that have been writing legislation in this country for the past 27 years.
Meanwhile Susan Blumenthal is back with her second in depth comparison of the election “positions” of the candidates regarding health care—this time focusing on health care IT.
BLOGS: HealthNewsReview.org: a daily checkup on U.S. health news coverage by Gary Schwitzer
Gary Schwitzer is Publisher
of HealthNewsReview.org. He’s a journalism professor at the
University of Minnesota, a member of the Association of Health Care
Journalists and, formerly, a 15-year television medical news reporter.
There’s probably never been as much high-quality health care journalism in the U.S. as there is
today, but, at the same time, there’s probably never been as much
schlock. We invite THCB readers to visit our
site – HealthNewsReview.org – a groundbreaking effort to provide
daily checkups of U.S health news coverage.
A team of more than two dozen
reviewers from across the U.S. – organized and funded by the Foundation
for Informed Medical Decision Making – regularly reviews health care news
stories reported by about 60 major news organizations. The reviewers
have different backgrounds – journalism, public health, medicine,
health services research – but they apply the same 10 standardized
criteria in their reviews of stories. (See “How We Rate Stories”)
After a little more than a
year of operation, and after reviewing 400 stories, our database allows
us to hold up a pretty clear mirror to news decision-makers about their
performance.
