Author Archives

Matthew Holt

Health Reform and Obama’s Leadership

Jul 26, 2009• 13

By RAHUL PARIKH

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By all accounts this is crunch time for President Obama on health care reform, and things couldn’t be more tenuous. In the past several weeks, we’ve seen unified Republican opposition to his ideas, a revolt against reform from leaders inside his own political party, and the head of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office testifying that the only direction he is bending the cost curve in is sharply upward.

As a physician who supports the President’s vision to improve the quality, access and lower costs, I’ve been following this debate closely. I’ve also been wondering what the debate about health reform tells us about the President’s leadership style. While I see him continuing to communicate his vision eloquently, there are two key leadership qualities Obama seems to lack that may prevent him from achieving his goals for reform.

Return to McAllen: A Father-Son Interview

Jul 26, 2009• 32

By IAN ROBERTSON KIBBE

By now, Dr. Atul Gawande’s article on McAllen’s high cost of health care has been widely read. The article spawned a number of responses and catalyzed a national discussion on cost controls and the business of medicine. It even made it’s way into the President’s address to the AMA.

Almost overnight, McAllen and the Rio Grande Valley were thrust into the national health care spotlight – the once sleepy border town became, not a beacon on a hill, but a balefire in the valley, representing much of what is wrong with the current medical culture.

But, McAllen wasn’t always like something from an old Western, where doctors run wild and hospital CEO’s compete like town bosses. I remember McAllen quite differently. I remember it, because as it turns out, it was where I was born.Continue reading…

Interview with Jonathan Bush, AthenaHealth CEO

Jul 26, 2009• 3

By MATTHEW HOLT

In this interview Jonathan Bush explains the nation’s major problem: a severe shortage of MUMPS programmers. Well not exactly, but as always the AthenaHealth CEO is well worth watching. And of course he’ll be at Health 2.0 on the same panel as Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman. That will really be worth watching, and of course you can sign up to come to Health 2.0 in October here.

The Case for Home Health Care

Jul 25, 2009• 35

By GEORGE TALER, MD

While Congress is debating health reform and struggling to accomplish the apparently competing goals of reducing costs while improving quality, I am part of a program that does both. As co-director of the Washington Hospital Center’s Medical House Call Program, I visit the sickest, frailest Medicare patients who consume a wildly disproportionate amount of Medicare dollars. Not only am I providing better care for my patients, I’m doing it where they want it — at home. House calls allow me to better manage their chronic conditions by seeing their medications, diet and home life and enabling me to better support their caregivers and coordinate their medical care. The math is simple: the better I do, the happier they are and the fewer times they need to visit an expensive hospital or nursing home. Shockingly, this proven approach that reduces unnecessary spending is being overlooked in the current reform debate.

Take one of our patients, Mrs. C, who has heart failure and pulmonary disease. She is chair- and bed-bound. She relies on her daughter for all her basic needs and cannot easily get to the office. Through our program, a team of doctors, nurse practitioners and social workers can visit Mrs. C at home and provide care on-site. We can manage her heart and lung problems on the spot, rather than having to wait until her symptoms are so severe that she has to go to an emergency department by ambulance. Additionally, avoiding the hospital means Mrs. C is less likely to face medical complications from a hospital visit. The accrued savings pay for a year’s worth of house calls for eight patients. Our program has shortened the hospital stays of 600 patients by a quarter, and reduced hospitalizations at end of life by 75 percent.Continue reading…

Commentology

Jul 24, 2009• 9

By ANONYMOUS

I'm retired now, but as a former lawyer, I simply must speak out in opposition to the various health care proposals that are being bandied about. It used to be said that what was good for GM was good for America. I submit that the more appropriate slogan in this day and age is that what's good for lawyers is good for America.

Right now the American system of health care proudly denies service to 40 to 50 million people, depending on your source. The great majority of them don't need health care anyway. Our system has always worked on the free market ideal that if you have what it takes, you'll achieve your goals. If you don't, then you can fall by the wayside. This philosophy has made this country great for over two centuries. Why change it now?

Carleen Hawn debuts HealthSpottr and a list

Jul 24, 2009• 29

By Matthew Holt

Carleen Hawn’s new site HealthSpottr is up and she’s starting with a list of the Top 100 random people in health care. Well it’s supposed to be innovators, but it mashes up a bunch of Health 2.0 folks with some biotech people, some health policy types (Berwick & Wennberg are close to the top), some health system types, and some academics. And yes, a certain Harvard Business School prof who’s one step ahead of the SEC is ahead of Uwe Reinhardt, with Enthoven not on the list. Perhaps most amusing is that Microsoft’s Peter Neupert is #1 while no-one from Google is on the list (Although Adam Bosworth is in there).

As you know I think lists and awards are tosh. But they are the US Weekly of the online world—trashy, you can’t admit to reading, but very good fun. Special prize for the THCB regular who can find the wrong photo attached to a name swiped from these very pages (hint, a mix up between two people who write together a lot),

So dive in and enjoy, and I think Carleen will be back with something a little more substantial soon.

Meanwhile, perhaps THCB should do one–I’m thinking “worst people in the healthcare world”. Votes for who I’d put on top please…

After Nurses Investigation, Scrutiny Turns to Other California Health Boards

Jul 24, 2009• 4

By ALEXANDRA ANDREWS Nurse_computer_flickr_20090721

Earlier this month, ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times published an investigation detailing the failure of the California Board of Registered Nursing to investigate and discipline nurses accused of misconduct in a timely manner. An examination of all disciplinary cases from 2002 to 2008 found that the board took an average of more than three years to investigate and close them — while the nurses accused of wrongdoing continued to practice without restriction. The day after the story was published, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced most members of the board, and its longtime executive officer resigned the day after that.

The fallout has continued. There have been a slew of follow-up editorials and articles in California newspapers. One, in the Los Angeles Times, said of the governor's response: "This time, he acted to protect patients, but where was the gubernatorial outrage when the state Board of Chiropractic Examiners, which included several of Schwarzenegger's friends, was accused in a state audit of similar failures to put consumers first?"

Another, in the San Francisco Chronicle, suggested that "Schwarzenegger shares a measure of blame too: his imposed work furloughs will slow investigations, and his administration should have been on the problem earlier."

Costs v Coverage: Krugman gets it–Brooks is almost quite close

Jul 24, 2009• 11

By Matthew Holt

So Paul Krugman, the NY Times Nobel Prize winning lefty columnist, says this (and echoes what I’ve been saying for a while)

So where in America is there serious consideration of moving away from fee-for-service to a more comprehensive, integrated approach to health care? The answer is: Massachusetts — which introduced a health-care plan three years ago that was, in some respects, a dress rehearsal for national health reform, and is now looking for ways to help control costs.

Why does meaningful action on medical costs go along with compassion? One answer is that compassion means not closing your eyes to the human consequences of rising costs. When health insurance premiums doubled during the Bush years, our health care system “controlled costs” by dropping coverage for many workers — but as far as the Bush administration was concerned, that wasn’t a problem. If you believe in universal coverage, on the other hand, it is a problem, and demands a solution.

So universal coverage systems find that they can’t just let the health care system increase costs because there is no safety valve of the uninsured to dump out of the system. We’re all in it.

Can HR 3200 Be Fixed?

Jul 23, 2009• 55

By ROGER COLLIER

Washington-united-states-capitol-washington-d-c-dccap1 Health care reform looks like it’s stalled. And rightly so, based on the provisions of the House Democrats’ health care reform bill. The grossly misnamed America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) combines the worst of all possible worlds: high taxpayer costs, big increases in federal deficits, and disincentives for businesses to hire, while leaving up to twenty million individuals still uninsured and doing little or nothing to control runaway national health care expenditures.

Although the bill would make health care coverage available to many of the millions who currently cannot afford it, its provisions will potentially add some $200 billion a year to federal expenditures, make only miniscule reductions in Medicare cost trends, and impose play-or-pay provisions and a new surtax that could hurt smaller businesses just as they try to recover from the recession.

So, is there anything that can be done to fix HR 3200 so that it would provide affordable universal health care coverage without increasing federal deficits or halting the recovery from the recession?

Rantology: Sympathy for the blue devils?

Jul 22, 2009• 21

By Matthew Holt

I do have some vague sympathy for the Blue Dogs, the group of mostly red-state Democrats who have to pretend that they care about fiscal responsibility. They, like me, think that we shouldn’t be increasing taxes on the non-health sector to pay for universal coverage. Unlike me they think that we should be reducing any commitment to universal coverage by reducing the level at which subsidies for people mandated to buy health care coverage cut off—which will leave us in a situation with lots of people who forgo coverage because they can’t afford it. I of course think that we should be finding the money to cover the uninsured from within the 16% of GDP we already spend on health care and then ratchet that overall number down, but then again I don’t have to get elected to Congress.

But I do have one modest question. Where were the dogs/devils’ concerns about the deficit when George Bush was borrowing for the future to pay for income and dividend tax rebates for the very wealthy, by invading Iraq and hiding the accounting, and by creating the boondoggle that was the Medicare Modernization Act. Now it’s late at night and I’m not going to go chasing voting records from 2001–3. But I sure have my guess….

More on the politics of health care reform: