Charity – The Health Care Blog

No Names, Please

Dec 23, 2020

By KIM BELLARD

Feeling good about your holiday spending? You’ve made it through most of this mostly horrible 2020, maybe lost a job or even a loved one, but still probably found a way to buy presents for your loved ones and maybe even to give some money to charity. Indeed, charitable giving was up 7.5% for the first half of 2020, despite the economic headwinds.

Then there’s MacKenzie Scott.

Ms. Scott, as you may recall, is the former wife of Amazon founder/CEO Jeff Bezos. She got Amazon stock worth some $38b in their 2019 divorce, which is now estimated to be worth around $62b. She just gave away $4.2b – and that’s on top of $1.7b she gave away in July.

In case your math skills are impaired, that’s $6b in six months, which Melissa Berman, chief executive officer of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors told Bloomberg: “has to be one of the biggest annual distributions by a living individual.” Ms. Scott has vowed: “I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”

Kenzie Bryant, writing in Vanity Fair, marveled: “It gives a whole new meaning to “fuck-you money.”

Private foundations are required to distribute at least 5% of their endowments each year; Ms. Scott not only has given away 10% of her net worth this year alone, but she hasn’t even used a foundation to do so. As The New York Times reported: “Ms. Scott’s operation has no known address — or even website. She refers to a “team of advisers” rather than a large dedicated staff.”

She doesn’t make recipients plead for money through grant applications. She doesn’t specify how the money is to be used, or require reports on how it is spent. She doesn’t expect her name on anything. She doesn’t even make public how much she is giving each recipient (although some choose to do so).

Let Them Depend on Charity

Dec 1, 2018

By MERRILL GOOZNER

Conservative economists writing in today’s Wall Street Journal dismiss the notion that the cost of providing medical care for the uninsured is eventually shifted onto those already insured. Citing an Urban Institute study that appeared in 2008 in Health Affairs, they claim the total cost shift is 1.7 percent at most, or $80 a year for the average plan. They also dismiss as flawed a Families USA study that found there was a significant rise in private insurance premiums to cover the cost of the uninsured.

How did the Democratic-controlled Congress that passed health care reform go wrong by accepting this premise?

Congress ignored the $40 billion to $50 billion that is spent annually by charitable organizations and federal, state and local governments to reimburse doctors and hospitals for the cost of caring for the uninsured. These payments, which amount to approximately three-fourths of the cost of such care, mitigate the extent of cost shifting and reduce the magnitude of the hidden tax on private insurance.

A few paragraphs later, they attack the health care reform law for relying on Medicaid to cover about half the uninsured who will receive coverage under the act:

Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals are so low that the program creates a cost shift of its own. In fact, a long line of academic research shows that low rates of Medicaid reimbursement translate into higher prices for the privately insured.

So patients who pay nothing or almost nothing do not shift costs because the providers — doctors and hospitals, primarily — get mostly reimbursed for that care by charities and the government. Yet discounted payments through Medicaid are made whole by cost shifting to private plans.Continue reading…

Matthew Holt’s EOY 2017 letter (charities/issues/gossip)

Dec 31, 2017• 2

Right at the end of every year I write a letter summarizing my issues and charities. And as I own the joint here, I post it on THCB! Please take a look–Matthew Holt

Well 2017 has been quite a year, and last year 2016 I failed to get my end-of-year letter out at all. This I would like to think was due to extreme business but it probably came down to me being totally lazy. On the other hand like many of you I may have just been depressed about the election–2016 was summed up by our cat vomiting on our bed at 11.55 on New Years Eve.

Having said that even though most of you will never comment on this letter and I mostly write it to myself, I have had a few people ask me whether it is coming out this year–so here it goes.

2017 was a big year especially for my business Health 2.0. After 10 years my partner Indu Subaiya and I sold it to HIMSS–the biggest Health IT trade association and conference. And although I used to make fun of HIMSS for being a little bit staid and mainstream, when it came to finding the right partner to take over Health 2.0’s mantel for driving innovation in health technology, they were the ones who stepped up most seriously. From now on the Health 2.0 conferences are part of the HIMSS organization, and Indu is now an Executive Vice President at HIMSS. I’ll still be very involved as chair of the conferences and going to all of them but will (hooray!) be doing a lot less back office & operational work. (Those of you in the weeds might want to know that we are keeping the Health 2.0 Catalyst division for now at least)

That does mean that next year I will have a bit more time to do some new things. I haven’t quite figured out what they are yet but they will include a reboot of (my role at least) on The Health Care Blog and possibly finally getting that book out of the archives into print. But if you have any ideas for me (and I do mean constructive ideas, not just the usual insults!) then please get in touch. You can of course follow me on Twitter (@boltyboy) to see what I’m thinking with only modest filtering!Continue reading…