Apologies for the quiet start today. A few things to keep you going with while I work on some other stuff off-line

MyMedwork is a MySpace/Linked in for physicians which has funding from a business accelerator started by bunch of big name mid-west medical orgs (including the Cleveland Clinic). Hey I (re-)met my fiancee on Linked-In so there must be something to this social networking stuff?

The first rumblings in the real business of health care—how much Medicare pays for what—are starting up. CMS is rattling the saber, and somehow managing to divert the attention onto 3M which is attempting to redesign DRGs and getting it in the neck for its troubles, apparently. Of course this is the beginning, not the end of a very long and ongoing process. The same thing is going on on the physician side around changes in the RVS system. The health plans have been muddying this water for some time, as I noted in my article about the punking of Milt Freudenheim back in June.

I’ve been having some fun backchat with Michael Cannon at Cato (the thinking man’s libertarian think-tank) over his riposte to my piece about Medicare HSAs. Well worth reading his response. More on that when I get my act together to edit our emails…Meanwhile over at Cato’s blog you should read anything Radley Balko’s written. He’s doing the best job in America about tracking the western liberal Democracies’ almost imperceptibly slow movement towards becoming authoritarian states. Did you know that “swearing” in public in the UK can now warrant a $130 on the spot fine at the sole discretion of the police?

Finally, working on some stuff on the new San Francisco health plan, which will emerge at Spot-on soon—now that I’m banned from writing about soccer for quite some time!