By THCB STAFF

Highly Credible Poll of the Day: Seven percent of Americans marry for health insurance. 

WSJ Health Blog:  In wake of celebrity snooping cases UCLA officials say "new system will make employees list their connection to the patient
and will warn them if they’re entering “an especially protected chart."

Calif. Gov will try to push through health care plan in Sacramento after defeat last year. Schwarzenegger to AP: "We’ll try again. We will continue on, keeping
the stakeholders together, fine-tuning it and seeing if we can improve
on it since we have the time now, then be back again. We feel very
confident."

Relatives of U.S. victims testify to Congress in tainted heparin case.

FDA: Contamination "probably intentional."

National Review: "incident exposes the ugly little secret about drug importation as a
means to lower the cost of medicine. Substandard and counterfeit drugs
proliferate in many countries in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere."

Surrendered to the void: LSD inventor Albert Hoffman dead at the age of 102. 

NIH Joins Newly Formed International Cancer Genome Consortium

Washington Post: Two Research Teams Reverse Congenital Blindness Using Genetically Altered Viruses

Seattle Times: Targeted Genetics Introduces Gene Therapy

Washington Post: Mining Cancer with Nano Gold in Maryland

MedPage: Pretty Pictures – French Develop Next-Gen, Graphical Medical Communications System

Open Call to MedBloggers- Join Blogging Against Disablism Day May 1st

Healthcare stocks. What’s the prognosis?

People trust health insurance companies to hold their health spending information more than they trust banks, according to a survey from Medavante.

In Cure the Confusion: The Consumer Experience of Online Healthcare, Medavante found that consumers perceived that health plans have less bias than financial institutions. Yet, 80 million Americans bank online.

Still, trust in online banking is eroding. Earlier this month, Bankrate’s survey asserted that Americans are very concerned about identity theft. This is beginning to impact their online behavior with banks.

This is a new finding. Other data sources assert that consumers lack trust in health plans when it comes to data. Forrester’s recent research discovered that consumers don’t necessarily trust health plans to keep personal health information private.Furthermore, Bruce Temkin’s excellent Customer Experience Index work at Forrester found that health plans rank in last place in customer experiences. With the growing role consumers are playing in personal health financing, banks are launching an initiative to play a major role in managing personal health information. The Medical Banking Project (MBP) was founded in 2001 as a rallying point for financial services institutions who were carving out a role in health care. Since then, the MBP has grown its membership and mission beyond driving paper out of health care. Its sights are set on "medical banking convergence:" the integration of medical information with health financial data.

But will consumers slow this convergence given their potential concerns about banks managing health information found by Medavante?

Jane’s Hot Points: It is possible that consumer trust has eroded in banks’ handling of personal information given more press and concern about identity theft, privacy gaffes, and potentially, the impact of the sub-prime mortgage crisis on the consumer psyche. At the same time, Medavante’s poll shows that consumers may have more trust in health plans — which would be big news for the industry.

By Don Johnson

McCain to talk about healthcare costs this week …

Health industry executives have few reasons to worry about the so
called health care reforms, or health insurance industry reforms, being
proposed by the presidential candidates.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is focusing his attention on heath care cost containment this
week, but a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal shows that he
doesn’t understand the problems any better than Senators Clinton and
Obama. Americans need regulatory changes (no laws are “reforms") that
make health insurance something consumers can use to protect themselves
against catastrophic losses and let individuals buy their policies
directly from insurers instead of buying policies selected by their
employers. And consumers should pay for their primary care and
preventive care services out of their pockets, or, at the least, buy
unbundled insurance for those services instead of buying bundled
insurance that is unaffordable for so many.

The real question is how much could a President McCain do about
health insurance costs with a Congress controlled by Democrats, and
would he pay much attention to the problem if it were clear that
Congress would mark his proposals dead on arrival?

Fortunately, the presidential candidates’ wild and undeliverable
promises of comprehensive health insurance reforms and universal health
insurance are being questioned by Congressional Democrats
as well as by the policy wonks quoted by the wsj.com. No wonder health
industry executives aren’t worried about who’s elected in the fall.
They apparently have decided it won’t make a difference for them or
their stocks.

Continue reading…

By Robert Laszewski

About 1990, I was a member of something called the Task Force on Genetic Testing at the then Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA). The health insurance industry realized that, with the Human Genome Project in its early stages, we weren’t far away from genetics being a part of everyday health care and the Orwellian implications on us as insurance underwriters were not lost.

The task was to think about all of this and develop an industry policy for dealing with it. Here’s the headline: In 1990, there was no disagreement among the many insurance executives on the panel that it should never be the insurance industry’s policy to use genetic information to underwrite or otherwise use the information in a way that disadvantaged the people we either insured or could insure.

Continue reading…