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The Families USA Health Action 2008 Conference – Brian Klepper

Along with other familiar voices like Maggie Mahar and Ezra Klein, I’m in DC today writing from the Families USA Health Action 2008 conference. Families USA is a progessive (liberal) consumer advocacy organization dedicated to universal coverage, driven by mobilizing the nation’s passionate citizen advocates. I am here at their invitation, but I should note, as an objective observer, not necessarily a cheerleader for the approaches advocated here. My perspective will undoubtedly be colored by my own experiences and realizations working on the dynamics of reform.

The idea that citizen involvement can drive meaningful change was a core theme of the conference’s opening speaker, Senator Blanche Lambert Lincoln, the senior senator from Arkansas. She serves on the Senate Finance Committee, which has oversight of Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and other health care programs. She was a champion of the SCHIP reauthorization bill, and advocated for small employer health care purchasing pools.

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HEALTH 2.0: NorthEast mixer is tonight

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So if you’re in Boston and want to find out more about Health 2.0 tonight, come to the Cambridge Marriottwhere the first Health 2.0 “local chapter” is having a networking mixer with speakers and panel. And yes I’m the speaker and Indu is one of the panelists.

The local chapter is the brainchild of VC Mark Modzelewski who has done a snappy job in putting this together in a short time. There are over 80 people signed up at the last count, but there’s probably room for a few more.

Here’s the site for more info and to sign up (there’s a small-ish fee to pay for the drinks & nibbles)

 

HEALTH 2.0 San Diego Update

If you’re thinking of attending Health 2.0 San Diego on March 3-4, there is still time to sign up for a pass, although like last time we are closing in on a sellout well in advance of the conference. Come see how Web 2.0 technologies are transforming the relationship between healthcare providers and consumers and meet many of the faces at the forefront of this process.

Featuring speakers from Kaiser Permanente, HealthGrades, Wired, Carepages, top design firm IDEO, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Silverlink, and many others. As well as demos by promising startups including MedEncentive, Xoova, Sprigley, and many more. Panels include: The User-Experience with Health 2.0, Connecting Consumers and Providers, Designing Health 2.0, Connecting with Health Organizations and Health 2.0 The Future User Experience.  Learn more at the Health 2.0 site

HEALTH PLANS/HOSPITALS: Not a smart move

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There’s been a lot of discussion about a potential health care score a la FICO score. The right way to do this would be some way to reward providers/plans whomever for doing whatever it takes to improve a population’s overall health. Plans/providers which improve a risk adjusted set of health outcomes would do well, and those that didn’t would not.

The wrong way would be to use the score to discriminate against sick people–by refusing them service before they have to chance to run up a bill they can’t pay.

Guess which appears to be being developed by Healthcare Analytics, a company that has as investors Fair  Issac–the company behind the FICO credit rating–and long time problematic for-profit hospital operator Tenet?

Now of course they may not be developing anything of the sort. Maybe it’s just a tool to help hospitals figure out what proportion of their bills are likely to get paid. But in that case why raise $30m in VC?

But you want to know how this will be perceived by the public? Try reading the 2000+ comments on this posting since last Friday! You can guess the reaction without reading the comments.

Healthcare Analytics had better get out there talking about what it’s really doing very quickly, or a whole lot of other people will be filling in the gaps for it. You might have noticed that the country’s mood right now is not very friendly towards corporate greed and bad behavior–and that will get worse as the coming recession deepens.

POLITICS: Another Zogby poll that’s wrong (but understandably so)

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Americans have been lying to pollsters for years, and here’s another example

Question: The candidates for president have each proposed changes to the healthcare system in America. Generally speaking, on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being not at all well, and 5 being very well, how well do you understand the details and differences of the various healthcare proposals put forth by the current presidential candidates?

1. Not at all well: 34%2. Not very well: 21%3. Neutral: 25%4. Well: 13%5. Very well: 6%6. Not sure: 1%

So discounting for the bullshit inflation factor of about 75% that means less than 5% of Americans understand all the candidates proposals—and not that many people read Bob L’s blog. And no I don’t count myself in that 5%. I have no idea what Romney’s health care plan is, ditto most of the rest of the Republicans other than Giuliani’s and he’s probably off back to fake homeland security consulting after Tuesday in Florida. And the Democrats can’t really make their minds up either. On the other hand I’m not sure I count the candidates in that 5% either!

The poll is from a website called PresidentialRx from a group at Vanderbilt Univ with a bunch of middle of the road healthcare worthies on board attempting to explain the health care policies of the candidates to the unwashed masses. There’s another one from HealthCentral run by our bud Craig Stoltz which we featured on THCB the other day which has really cool graphics. (And Susan Blumenthal has done yeoman’s work getting all the details down on her HuffPo blog)

But don’t forget kids, chances of anything actually happening in the next Administration that resembles anything much of the actual plans of any candidate as now described? — low

HEALTH2.0: iMedix gets big nod…

iMedix, a really new start-up that combines search and community messaging in health care won “best start-up” in The Crunchies. The Crunchies is the latest Web 2.0 awards show run by a combo of Web 2.0 tech blogs including TechCrunch, Read/Write Web and a couple of others. I’m not exactly a big fan of award shows—there’s this thing called the market which tends to be a more important judge—but it’s nice to see health care getting some notice from the ubber-tech crowd.

Well done to Iri, Amir and the team back in Israel.

Code Blue! Republicans leaning left on healthcare! Craig Stoltz

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Health08Craig Stoltz is a web consultant working in the health
2.0 space. He has previously served as health editor for the Washington Post and editorial director of Revolution Health. He blogs at Web 2.0 … Oh really? I recently had a hand in a project, called the Healthcare08
PoliGraph
, which seeks to find meaningful
distinctions among the presidential
candidates’ healthcare policies. This was tougher than it sounds.

This being the primary season, each party’s contenders are pretty
much sticking with the approved script. The Democrats are trying to outbid each
other for cradle-to-grave healthcare for all humans treading on U.S. soil. The
Republicans are quietly uttering free-market shibboleths to avoid alienating
their big contributors until the fall, when they’ll probably have to promise to
do something or other.

The PoliGraph project plotted each candidate’s stances on
six healthcare issues on big graphics. We plotted their positions along two
axes: from left (i.e., federalphilic) to right (federalphobic), and from most
important to least important (to the candidate, not us). 

By parsing the data carefully, we were able to find some
daylight between candidates, even within each party’s tight ideological clusters.

For instance, for all the fuss over comparing Clinton’s and
Edwards’s personal “mandates” that
people have insurance, when we dug into her plan we found her solutions more inclusive
of market forces than either Edwards’ or Obama’s. (This gets wonkish, but Hillary
gives small businesses incentives to
offer private insurance coverage to employees;  Edwards and Obama depend more on mandates and
expanding public programs to fill that gap. Hey, it’s something.)

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POLITICS/TECH: Theocratic fascist scumbag rears ugly head in health care

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Joe Paduda points us towards the latest adventures of the scummiest holier than thou corrupt theocratic fascist in recent American political history, who’s now raking it in overseeing corruption “prevention” in the implant business. Zimmer has been forced by one of his former colleagues in the US attorney’s office to hire his law firm at a just outrageous rate. Joe raises legitimate points about the culture of pay-offs all round in the implants/devices business which are now infecting the regulators.

But I just can’t get past seeing that man and all the pain he caused, not to mention his shredding of America’s tradition of civil liberties. For more on his raking it in, see earlier THCB explosions. Sometimes I hope there is that afterlife that he preaches about, because if there is I know where Ashcroft is going.

 

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