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HEALTH PLANS/QUALITY: BC California on P4P

My erstwhile colleagues at FierceHealthcare have an interview up with Dr. Michael Belman, staff VP and Medical Director, Blue Cross of California. It’s a pretty good introduction, for those of you who don’t know much about it, to the P4P program in California.

On the other hand they never asked him what kind of wonderful results that Wellpoint got from dumping $40m worth of computers onto the doctors of America without any metrics or intent to actually make them integrate said computers into their workflow. (I suspect eBay got some sellers’ commissions out of it, though). Nor did they ask whether paying for performance includes paying bonuses to their underwriting staff to find ways to cancel members’ policies retroactively.

Oh well, perhaps that’ll be in the next interview!

TECH: JSK tries to sort out the “Chaos and Creation in the Health IT Market”

Jane Sarasohn Kahn tries to sort out chaos and creation in the Health IT Market.  JSK “remains hopeful” that the market will sort it all out. I’d say she was from the Planet Pluto, but it’s not one anymore. (Ho, Ho)  Seriously, she lays out a whole host of reasons why the government “push” for IT has perhaps been overstated by the analysts as a factor for market growth, and knowing JSK as I do, reading between her lines, she’s quietly crying bullshit. On the other hand, I do think that the automation of the smaller hospitals due to the labor shortage is a bigger factor than the mainstream analysts seem to think. So there will be some creation, but still lots and lots of chaos.

PHARMA: Jim Edwards is very smart

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Brandweek’s Jim Edwards is very smart and sees through the industry BS very well—almost at a Venessa Furhman level. He probably should be plying his trade on a bigger stage given the rubbish that the science/business reporters of certain national dailies have been writing about health care lately.

His latest is one called, Drug Companies Won’t Sell Sales Reps Short. Jim notices that despite all the pundits (me included) thinking that pharmacos will have to rationalize their sales forces, they haven’t actually done so yet, and don’t appear very keen to do so.

INTERNATIONAL: Maybe privatization in the UK will not be quite so swift

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Strike one for the little guy. A pensioner (that’s a “senior” to us Yanks) has won a court battle to stop a US healthcare giant from taking over a GP practice. The giant in question is United HealthGroup which apparently has also got a few other problems.

Perhaps doctors and hospitals in Arizona, St Louis and the outer boroughs of New York City should be flying in 67 year old Ms Pam Smith, 67, a former hosiery worker and Labour councillor from the huge metropolis of Langwith, Derbyshire, to advise them on how to “work” with United?

PHARMA/POLICY: New trial for Hurwitz

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Excellent news as there’ll be a new trial for William Hurwitz. I’m trying to find out if they’ve released him from jail already. I and my crusty old dad have both contributed to his defense fund, and it looks like it’s paying off. (More on the story here)

Of course in any just society, Hurwitz would be practicing medicine, with the forces of organized medicine at his side protecting him and his patients instead of just turning their backs, and the scumbag DAs and DEA arseholes who put him in jail would be rotting there in his place—and being denied the pain medication that they need.

How about a new trial for Richard Paey now?

PHYSICIANS/TECH: Technology won’t replace doctors — and it won’t cut costs, at least so says a doctor

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Kessler’s book on how doctors will get replaced by technology is dissed by a doctor who points out that he had to go to medical school and learn stuff that you could never teach a CT Scanner, dammit! And those bastard venture capitalists next door earn far more money! I suspect steel workers in the 1960s said the same thing. I’m not exactly sympathetic to Kessler’s argument, but with defenses of the status quo like this…..

POLICY: Grace-Marie Turner podcast transcript.

I know a lot of people don’t like podcasts and the one I did with Grace Marie Turner from Galen back in April was both fascinating and recorded in a painful way to listen to. So now I’ve found CastingWords who do excellent transcripts for relatively little money, I’ve had this one transcribed. My original comments and the podcast are here. Read enjoy and comment away

Matthew: So I’m talking with Grace-Marie Turner. Grace-Marie is the president of the Galen Institute, which is a think-tank based in the Washington, D.C. area which has been very vocal on the consumer directed healthcare and HSA side. She is also taking part in a consumer directed healthcare conference coming up in San Francisco, and as part of that, I thought it would be fun to interview her. So Grace, welcome to our THCB podcast. How are you today?

Grace-Marie: Thank you. I’m fine. Delightful to be with you.

Matthew: OK, so let me start off. As you know, people of different political persuasions are reading a lot of different things into the early data that’s coming back from the consumer directed health plans, HSA, HRA, high deductible health plan movement that’s going on. And there are people with different political persuasions looking at the same data in different ways. So I don’t want to get too much into the mire of that, but I’m interested in the philosophy behind why you think that a consumer directed high deductible health plan is a good thing for the nation as a whole. So I’d like to get your take on that, and then I have some questions around how this thing how it works in theory rather than practice. So in general, why are you a supporter of this movement?

Grace-Marie: All right. First of all I’m not sure that it’s the right thing for the country as a whole, but I think that there are millions of people out there who are truly shut out of the health insurance market that find health savings accounts an attractive alternative……

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