I am supposed to be (but for reasons of schedule and health—I’ll explain later—failing to be) one of the participants in the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog. But there are lots of great entries there and currently there is Live Blogging of the Influenza Leadership Forum in Washington, DC. Check it out and hopefully I’ll be able to join in later in the week.

Up at WorldHealthCareBlog (eventually after some production delays) is the interview I did back in April with Jonathan Cohn, author of Sick.. That’s Sick the book as oppsed to the remarkably similar I guess (as I havent seen it yet) Sicko the movie.

And in an appalling sloppy piece of journalism or editing in the UK newspaper The Independent Andrew Gumble retells a seres of stories from Cohn’s book Sick and ascribes them to Moore’s movie, even though he mentions Cohn’s book later.

I guess Jon should scruff up and put on a few pounds….

The answer is not much.

Aon surveyed more than 70 leading healthcare insurers and found that healthcare costs are projected to increase by 10.9 percent for HMOs, 10.8 percent for POS plans, 11.2 percent for PPOs and 10.7 percent for CDH plans. This represents rates of increase lower than one year ago, when HMO cost increases were 12.2 percent, 11.9 percent for POS plans, 12.4 percent for PPOs and 12.5 percent for CDH plans.

So in this survey premium cost growth rates are still well, well above wage growth. So a bigger and bigger share of wages (or the total available to pay wages) is going towards healthcare. And now the public sector, with its new accounting requirements, is starting to run into the same problems. So at some point those “unsustainable” trends start becoming apparent. While the NY Times focuses on the problems within the system, the LA Times has been focusing on the impact on financing and insurance. Maybe the word will get out of those two august organs and make it into the Six O’Clock news sometime.

But it’s all part of the same issue, and eventually there will be some kind of political solution. But of course things might get much worse before they get any better.

Monday’s NY Times had a sensible story about practice variation, essentially writing a guide to the Dartmouth Atlas. What’s remarkable is that it’s the second story about the topic in less than a week. David Leonhardt wrote a sensible one a few days back that was featured in THCB.

This is from the paper that couldn’t stop licking its festering sores on the same topic last year, when it printed four articles in quick succession that said that all our health care spending was essentially demanded–and worth it–and that there was no reason that we shouldn’t spend 20% of GDP or even more on health care. After all it was what we wanted, and what did we have to spend the money on that was better?

(Leonhardt somehow has written about the Dartmouth Atlas stuff and still believes that we should spend 20% of GDP on health care according to an email he sent me! So they’re not out of the woods yet. But David Cutler seems to be having some sort of a conversion too…)

But what’s really amazing is that after years of writing mostly nutty stuff about health care that caused Brian Klepper to wear out his keyboard writing protests, in perhaps the most health care articles in one issue ever of the NY Times on Monday you could also read about:

• Why patients couldn’t trust information from other patients and should blindly do what their doctor says (not too bright an article, as the doctor is often wrong as RAND knows)
• Whether WebMD’s stock is a good buy (Probably)
• mandatory health insurance–why an individual mandate is hard (a not bad job of explaining the basics of risk pools, but ignoring the easier way of doing it through the tax system–although I preferred my interview with John Kingsdale who features heavily in the NY Times piece)
• that putting in an EMR is very expensive for doctors and doesn’t necessarily pay off (Duh! But probably important given the stress on IT in many health policy plans); and,
• that a human life is worth something–a not-bad introductory article on cost benefit analysis in health care although in all its explanations on what a life-year or even a QALY is, it never mentioned the most useful number–how much a human might earn in a year. That number is of course how the rest of the economy values a human life, and sadly folks it’s much lower than what health economists like David Cutler likes to use.

But the big picture is that by my count that’s six in depth analysis articles in one issue of the NY Times about health care, four of which introduce relatively sophisticated concepts in a not-too dumb fashion. My friends, this is what we call progress!

And just perhaps this health care stuff might be important?

A BBC reporter called me looking for uninsured people in the Los Angeles area to tell their story. Is that you? Want to be a star on radio in the UK?  You have to be in LA, but if you want to tell your story contact her directly. Regan Morris 323 467 4134 or cell 323 828 6852