Leading up to the November election, the health reform proposals of presumptive presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama will be analyzed, compared and critiqued until absolutely nothing original is left to say about them.
The team of strategists corralled to draft the proposals are now defending and promoting them. Both sides have put Harvard professors and U.S. Representatives to work, but the similarities end there.
Here’s a brief look each candidates’ health wonk roster:
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a new section on its Web site last
week aimed at sharing best practices for improving health care. The new Quality/Equality portion is full of engaging multimedia features and includes an expansive library of interventions and tools, resources and videos.
“We know that spreading the best practices and lessons learned from these programs will require a combination of several things, one of which had to do with creating useful, accessible content from these program experiences directly aimed at the people we want to make the change—the doctors, nurses, policymakers, and leaders who are at the front lines of improving health care," said Minna Jung, Foundation spokeswoman.
"We don’t know yet if offering this content will help engage bigger audiences in improving health care quality for all Americans," she said. "But we feel we’ve got to try to do this type of web outreach, and do it well,"
FORBES: Fed Chief Ben Bernanke fans the flames of
health reform. "It’s not just balancing the federal budget; it’s really
a much broader question of the stability and strength of our economy
over a longer period of time," Benanke said.CHICAGO TRIBUNE: AMA turns thumbs down to secret medical shoppers. "It is grossly unethical," said Dr. Howard Chodash, a professor at Southern Illinois University Medical School.
WASH POST: "Halting runaway medical inflation represents a potential victory for all generations," wrote Sandra Day O’Connor and James R. Jones.
BOSTON GLOBE: "No single reform would do as much to improve the wealth of our nation and the lives of Americans as a comprehensive overhaul of our healthcare system. But the best chance of swift and major reform may have died with the end of Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House," consultant Ellen Lutch Bender wrote in an Op-ed.
US NEWS: 6 Ways to Avoid Dying of a Surprise Heart Attack — inspired by the unfortunate and untimely death of Tim Russert.
NY TIMES: Massachusetts health reform working but challenges remain.
CNN: Baby Boomers seek "brain fitness" gurus.
AMA NEWS: Patients don’t use online ratings to pick docs but do rely on word of mouth online.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke’s freshman-level term paper on health care economics shows how little he knows about it.
Here’s the evidence:
He talks about the health care system in America as if there is one. There are thousands of health care systems in this country. They include the military and Veterans Administration health care systems, the investor-owned and not-for-profit health care systems and systems owned and run by states, counties and municipalities. Typical systems include hospitals, specialty hospitals, long-term care facilities and services and primary care, diagnostic, emergency care and surgical clinics. Every state and municipality that has a hospital, doctor’s office, nursing home or other health care provider is a health care and health insurance market. In addition, we have dozens of medical devices, medical supplies and pharmaceutical markets. While they are interdependent, they are not in a “system.”
Doctor-owned specialty hospitals deliver better quality of care, are more convenient for physicians and patients and take business away from not-for-profit and investor-owned general acute care hospitals, which have been trying to put them out of business for years.
The NY Times reports on the latest effort by liberal Democrats to take down the for-profit specialty hospitals. The Democrats behind this drive don’t believe in for-profit health care providers even though not-for-profit providers are as profit driven as the investor-owned providers. Most Republicans oppose the effort to restrict the growth of doctor-owned hospitals because they understand that many local hospital markets are dominated by a few institutions and that patients and insurance buyers need more competition among providers to keep costs under control.
This is a battle between the powerful American Medial Association, which supports doctor-owned hospitals, and the American Hospital Association, which represents mostly not-for-profit hospitals and wants to end competition from the doctor-owned specialty hospitals.
By 
Keith Schorsch is a busy boy. Not only did he write a much commented piece about
Google Health and PHRs on this very station last week, but he also popped by last week to tell me about the new look for Trusera. Several of you saw Trusera launch at the Health 2.0 Conference last March. As of today they’ve removed the Beta tag, and have introduced a new look and new features.
The way Trusera is going about things is by collecting stories and journal entries, and then essentially parsing the keywords and text in those stories to connect people with others with similar situations. The distinction between this and most other social networking sites is that Trusera doesn’t have “forums
” or “channels” per se, but uses its search technology (somewhat inspired by Amazon where several of the founding team came from) to match lurkers and contributers with content and people relevant to them. There’s also some neat tools to help people build their stories with helpful suggestions appearing to the side as they’re being written — think of the Microsoft paper clip but done well! (At this stage it doesn’t take detailed self-reported patient clinical information a la PatientsLikeMe or PHRs).
So far there’s sizable activity on Trusera in autism, breast cancer and infertility, among other conditions. And of course Keith’s aim is to develop hundreds of thousands of members and millions of stories.
Trusera’s approach is different enough to be interesting as another option for community online. The technology is arguably better than others in the space, but as we know from other markets “better” technology doesn’t always mean most successful — as I tell many of my Mac using colleagues. But as was also pointed out to me this weekend, the vast majority of patients are not yet online in these communities. So it’ll be interesting as these numbers grow to see who will remain standing. Trusera clearly has a shot.
until I saw this. Scroll down to the polka version of “A long way to the top.” Talk about a highway to hell!
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has immediate openings for seasoned Product
Managers to support product development for Web and digital products aimed at consumers and employees.The product manager plays a key role in ensuring the strategic direction, design and on-time delivery of Mayo Clinic Health Solution’s online products including, MayoClinic.com, Mayo Clinic Health Assessment, Symptom Checker, Expert Blogs and other social/new media, and mobile applications.
Clinton has quit, Obama has three times McCain’s resources, and the country is fed up with the Republicans’ war, corruption and toadying to corporations. Democrats have won three "safe" Republican house seats
in recent months. It’s their election to lose, and assuming that the
fences between rivals really are mended, it might be a landslide.
I’ve written previously that I don’t think Obama is serious about pursuing health care reform. But this week he changed his tune and said categorically that by the end of his first term, there would be universal healthcare.
In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums
by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. And we’ll do it by
….covering every single American and making sure that they can take
their health care with them if they lose their job…..We’ll do it by
the end of my first term as President of the United States……
Read the rest at Spot-On and return here to comment.
Health minister “denies she is crazy”. OK she’s Australian, so take that with a grain of salt.
What’s the fuss about? Using more allied professionals to replace primary care docs. Apparently that’s not certifiable, even in Australia.
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