Category: Matthew Holt

Matthew Holt is the founder and publisher of The Health Care Blog and still writes regularly for the site and hosts the #THCBGang and #HealthInTwoPoint00 video shows/podcasts. He was co-founder of the Health 2.0 Conference and now also does advisory work mostly for health tech startups at his consulting firm SMACK.health.

Will Victory on Health Care Reform Mean Defeat for the Democrats?

Sep 27, 2009• 50

By MATTHEW HOLT

Being a futurist is not really about making predictions, but people ask for them anyway.

So here is one: The way things are trending right now, Obama and the Democrats will succeed in getting a reform bill – and it will cost them the Congress in 2010 and possibly the presidency in 2012. Why? Because it will be ineffective at bringing most voters any tangible benefits soon, and ineffective especially at bringing down the cost of health care.

Obama (along with everyone else) repeatedly talks about “affordable” health care. What the bill is most likely to bring is health insurance reform. This is very important, and will bring tangible benefits especially for those who must go without insurance now because they have “pre-existing conditions.” But there is nothing in the bills that are most likely to pass that will really bring down the costs of health care any time soon. Yet the bills demand that the health plans cover many more people, and the providers treat them, while putting in place no mechanisms that would forcefully and quickly control costs – so costs are likely to go up even faster than before.

Yet another reason to abolish the Senate

Sep 26, 2009• 12

By Matthew Holt

Ezra Klein, feeling a little soft, interviews Kent Conrad—he of the co-op feed stores for health care idea.

My take on the interview is that I seriously believe Conrad's entire knowledge of health care comes from his time being lectured on the vagaries of Medicare reimbursement by a local rural hospital lobbyist, his one visit to a co-op seed store where he found the farmers chatting happily, and his reading the cliff notes (prepared by his staff) of TR Reid's good but not too sophisticated book focusing on the Beveridge v Bismarck distinction—which is high school civics lesson stuff.

Yet he gets to meet 61 times with the Gang of six that was really going to get it all right before time ran out, and he gets to make policy!

And you wonder why the Senate should be abolished.

Interview: John White, Director IT, AHRQ

Sep 25, 2009

By Matthew Holt

Last week I got to spend some quality time in Washington DC including moderating a panel looking at new research behind physician-patient communication at the annual AHRQ conference. AHRQ will play a significant role in comparative effectiveness research, as it basically is channeling the $1 billion or so in the stimulus package for that. But AHRQ is also pretty active in trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t in health care IT, and has an online resource center about that too.

The man running AHRQ’s initiatives in IT is John White, who’s affable, amusing and has an interesting point of view or two. So to let you know a little more about the mysteries of government, here’s my interview with John.

Regina Holliday: Fred’s life & death at 73 cents a page

Sep 24, 2009• 5

By MATTHEW HOLT

If you ever wonder why the efforts to make it easier for patients and families to get information and be treated as equals in their care by the medical care system matter….

If you need convincing that the concept of participatory medicine is important enough for its own society, advocates & journal….

If you wonder whether it’s OK to wait to phase in the possibility of patients actually having rights to their own data….

Read Regina Holliday’s story about Fred’s illness and the way she and he were treated.

Protest Music at AHIP meeting

Sep 24, 2009• 8

By MATTHEW HOLT

This is much more fun and better sung than traditional protests! And given that AHIP would benefit from a public option, I suspect Karen Ignagni hired them. It looks like it happened in the closing session of this AHIP conference on Friday although having sat in many of these conferences I do need to tell the protestors that no plotting is done in these Forums. That happens elsewhere…

A little ain’t enough, or is it?

Sep 20, 2009• 4

By Matthew Holt

I've been so buried in the run up to Health 2.0 that I haven’t had a chance to add to the deluge of electrons about the bills in Congress, Obama’s speech, the several hundred amendments to Baucus’ bill in mark-up, etc, etc. And my colleagues on THCB and elsewhere are taking good care of you in the details.

But I thought that I’d quickly respond to today’s WaPo article in which Erza Klein connects two themes that matter, while leaving out two that matter more. The first of the two he identifies is that most Americans don’t see the cost of health care. If we made them all write a check for $13,000 a year, and they’d seen that number go from $8,000 a decade ago and realized that it will be $25,000 in another decade, then the cost problem would be much more real. It would also get associated with the access problem as people realize that as the cost goes up, they (and their employer) can afford less. At the moment those problems are disconnected.

The ignorance here remains palpable. An HR exec I know did an exit
interview last week with an employee who was astonished to find out
that now he was on his own he could buy family health insurance in
California for under $500 a month which was less than his contribution
to the company plan. The concepts of risk pooling, risk selection,
varying benefit levels et al were clearly foreign to him. And of course
had his family had a pre-existing condition that policy might have cost $3,000 a month or more.

Washington DC conference and party!

Sep 14, 2009• 1

By MATTHEW HOLT

Wednesday morning I’ll be at the AHRQ annual conference in Rockville, Maryland. I’m moderating a panel looking at “Experiences in Patient-Centered Care: Improving Coordination and Communication among Patients and Providers”. Given this is an AHRQ meeting there’ll be actual research presented from:

- Gail Brottman, Director of Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis;
- Jennifer Uhrig, Senior Health Communication Scientist at RTI;
- Jim Tufano, Assistant Professor, University of Washington’s program in Biomedical & Health Informatics

Of course I’ll be dragging them down to my non-academic level pretty soon!

If you can’t join the academics in the morning, you may want to come by a drinks party hosted by my friend Maggi Cary in the evening. For that one you’ll have to email me to find out a few more details!

Protest songs in health care?

Sep 13, 2009• 10

By Matthew Holt

A health care reform protest video that rocks! (Hat-tip to ePatientDave)

Video: Obama addresses Congress on Health reform

Sep 10, 2009• 17

TRANSCRIPT: Full text of Obama speechAUDIO: via NPR
POLITICO: Opponent’s “You Lie!” outburst may have unified Democrats.REBUTTAL: Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA)

Economist: “A huge step forward. With one exception …”

Sep 10, 2009• 39

A thumbs up:

“Cleverly borrowing good ideas from both sides of the party divide, his proposals at least look like a plausible basis for agreement. The plan obliges everyone to take out health insurance while creating a tapering subsidy for poorer families to help them afford it. It also requires insurance companies to end various nefarious practices, such as refusing to insure people with existing conditions or cancelling their coverage just when they need it most. To pay for these long-held liberal goals (the cost is put at $900 billion over ten years), the president has committed himself to several policies that Republicans, if only they could remove their partisan spectacles, should applaud.