Holy schamoly. The NY Times farms out John Cohn’s book Sick to get reviewed to the AEI and .it still gets a great review. I assume the AEI scholar (Sally Satel) will last about as long as an AstraZeneca drug sales manager who also tells the truth.
JOB POST: Patient Safety — What could be more important?
The McHenry Group is conducting a Regional Sales search for the
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Reports indicate that as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each
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Our client is dedicated to delivering technology that
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of positive patient ID, medication administration, specimen collection, blood
transfusions, patient charting/viewing and charge capture. More on the THCB job board
PHARMA/POLICY: Is the drug war nearing an end?
It’s Friday and I’m up over at Spot-on with a rather too hopefully titled piece called, Is the drug war nearing an end?. Come back here to comment.
POLICY: Shock, horror–I almost agree with John Goodman
John Goodman, the president of the right-wing pressure group NCPA from which he and his wife draw down nearly $600,000 a year, has a piece in the Wall St Journal called, Perverse Incentives in Health Care. The shocking thing is that I mostly agree with him about the perversity of incentives in health care. He is though wrong to blame third-party payments for everything and more importantly wrong to assume that private third-party payment imitates government third-party payment. In fact the reverse is true. Medicare is modeled after the typical Blue Cross major medical plan of the 1960s, which is why it is so damn hard to reform today. And it’s not third party payment, it’s the way we organize third party payment that’s the problem.
But after reading Goodman’s piece I have no idea what his overall solution is. He even spends some of the article slagging off HSAs, which is pretty rich given that he and his organization pushed them on an unsuspecting nation, mostly in the pay of Dan Rooney and the other scumbags at Golden Rule. His problem with HSAs is that they are connected to third party insurance policies, which then mandate their own rules on what is covered and what isn’t. I’ve been telling anybody who will listen that that’s the problem with high deductible plans for a long time. Well done Goodman on catching up.
Goodman does have one solution. People should only have conditions and diseases that can be cured by one-time procedures that are relatively cheap and can be paid off using a credit card in a finite amount of time. It’s probably a shocking revelation to Goodman and his cohorts in the free marketeer camp, but most health care is required by a small minority of people who are very sick, and they can’t afford to pay for their care with the loose change they find in their couch cushions. That’s why we have third party payment in the first place. So perhaps it makes some sense to figure out how to reform that. Of course Goodman has no answers, which is not something that can be said for either Alain Enthoven or the single-payer crowd.
Actually I guess Goodman does have an answer–just make sure your country’s only illness is relatively mild myopia, because he thinks Lasik is the cure for everything (even if the actual research shows that there’s lots of lies told about that too!).
And then there’s a guy I’ve never heard of at Yahoo Finance called Charles Wheelan writing a very sensible piece about how we fail to rationally ration health care in the US. Why isn’t he writing in the pustilent sore licking section of the NY Times, or perhaps more appropriately, shouldn’t he get his shot in the WSJ opinion page?
CODA: This post is a reminder of why you should never use a web form for anything. I had written the whole thing, got distracted by something else, thought I’d saved it, and when I left the form I discovered that I had set a time for it to publish but not actually told it to publish. So of course it had all vanised. I usually write my post in a third-party client editor called Blogjet. I’m now trying to quickly redo what I did before using voice dictation, but of course Dragon NaturallySpeaking is giving me a really hard time– it’s really not quite ready for prime time either.
BLOGS: Life of a blog thread
Stolen from the NY Times. Click to enlarge.
BLOGS: World healthcare blog
You may remember that around this time last year I was the official blogger at the World Health Care Congress in Washington DC. Well now the WHCC folks have got quite carried away and have their own new blog and lots of official bloggers. And yes I’m one of them. Hopefully I’ll get some podcasts with speakers in advance of the conference, and some pod/videos-casts from the conference itself.
The conference itself will be April 22–24 in Washington DC. If you’re planning to be there, and (just say) you want to use your expense account to buy me a drink—get in touch!
BLOGS: HWR is up at the Health Affairs Blog
Jane Hiebert-White hosts a great Health Wonk Review at the Health Affairs blog. Don’t miss the brief but touching tribute to her late father-in-law. He sounds like he was a real powerhouse.
PHARMA/POLICY: John Tierney covers the Hurwitz Trial
John Tierney, who sadly gave up his libertarian op-ed column in the NY Times reports on the William Hurwitz trial. Regular THCB readers will remember how appalling the DEA is in its draconian persecution of pain doctors, and how they deliberately changed their own guidelines during this trial and removed them from their website because the defense was going to show that Hurwitz prescribed by them.
If I believed in hell, I’m sure that DEA head honcho Karen Tandy would be going there for her statement that Hurwitz deserved 25 years because he “was no different from a cocaine or heroin dealer peddling poison on the street corner.” But apparently Tandy’s travels are instead taking her to more interesting locales at the taxpayer’s expense.
PHARMA: 60 Minutes on the MMA
60 Minutes on Sunday had an entertaining story about the Medicare drug bill’s passage in late 2003. Not exactly new news, but a fun retelling of how Tom Delay, and PhRMA rammed the bill through literally by holding the vote open for three hours and torturing the crap out of any Republican who was a fiscal conservative and likely to vote no.
What amazes me was that any Republicans at all felt squeamish about that. Hadn’t they seen how Delay operated? Hadn’t they met a PhRMA lobbyist in their time in DC? Hadn’t they noticed the Administration cow-towing to industry in every other sphere of government? Didn’t they know that every possible opposition group was bought off in the bill? Hadn’t they noticed the deficit going through the roof?
And what’s the relevance of telling the story again three and a half years later?
(CODA: Dan Burton, one of the Republicans interviewed, is actually somewhat interesting. For example he’s a long time drug war loon, but in 2002 he actually said some interesting things about the drug war almost hinting at the fact that he realizes what a waste of time and money it is. So maybe there is some hope…)
POLICY/POLITICS: Universal Health Insurance and the NY Times–all hail Jon Cohn (with brief UPDATE)
In recent months, not content with letting Judy Miller transcribe enough Cheney press releases to sink us into a $1 trillion dollar/3,000 lives and counting quagmire in Iraq, whomever runs the New York Times’ health care coverage has essentially handed the keys to the liquor cabinet to a succession of idiots who wouldn’t know anything about health care if they were sober. It’s then printed a series of the most illogical, stupid and plain wrong articles about health care that’s so bad that I’ve run out of ways to describe how if the NY Times were a dog it could not leave its pustilent sore alone.
But Holy Cowdung Batman. Maybe there’s hope, as they’ve this weekend allowed Volvo-driving latte-quaffing liberal Jonathan Cohn—who actually knows something about the topic— to write a long article for the magazine. It’s called What’s the One Thing Big Business and the Left Have in Common? and the answer isn’t too surprising.
But now they’ve taken this timorous first step, what’s next for the NY Times— op-eds from Enthoven or Fuchs? Regular columns from Brian Klepper? Giving Ian Morrison or Robert Laszewski a chance to explain how health care really works? Cutting and pasting from THCB? I’m waiting!
UPDATE: I’ve added a permanent & free link to Jon’s piece so it’s not buried behind the NY Times firewall. He focuses on exactly the correct topic, which is "Do big business CEOs have the cojones to take on the health care industry," in other words to piss off all those drug and insurer CEOs they meet at their Wyoming hunting lodges. And of course can the ones who are losers in the current charade (Safeway, Costco, anyone with a union) persuade enough of their colleagues that they shouldn’t be competing over who can pay the lowest health care benefits–when WalMart seems to be winning that contest too. An excellent piece, so go over there, read it and ponder why the NY Times doesn’t print more like it as compared to the pustilent sore variety for which they seem to have such an appetite.
