Health 2.0’s Spring Fling is just 3 weeks away. We are expecting a great crowd, so register today!
Catch expertly curated sessions with brand new themes, products debuting to the public for the first time, and discussion on compelling success stories about delivery reform, all while celebrating Spring in San Diego!
Newly Confirmed Speakers
More speakers – more perspectives – more reasons to attend Health 2.0!Continue reading…
By DAVE DRANOVE
Pending Supreme Court review, the provisions of Affordable Care Act (ACA) are gradually working their way through the system. But we are still three years away from the centerpiece of the ACA – the insurance exchanges. The combination of purchase mandates, taxes, subsidies, and underwriting restrictions that govern the exchanges has never been tried and no one knows if the exchanges will work. Even the academic theorists who assembled this patchwork quilt of rules and regulations have their fingers crossed.
Given the lengthy wait between passage and full implementation of the ACA, it was inevitable that the op-ed pages would be filled with alternatives to exchanges. Some critics would scrap them in favor of some bastardized version of the status quo, leaving tens of millions uninsured. But commentators on the right and left have offered bolder ideas for expanding coverage. Some conservatives promote voucher plans. These proposals feature open enrollment periods and a few other mechanisms that will promote broad risk pools without all the other regulatory bells and whistles. Some liberals renew the call for a single payer system. Frankly, I think both of these “ideologically pure” approaches will be more successful than the mongrelized ACA.
This is why I am intrigued by a bill that is flying under the radar screen in Congress. This bill, which has the support of President Obama, would allow states to implement their own rules for expanding health insurance coverage. If the bill provides enough carrots in the form of tax subsidies (that would have otherwise funded the ACA exchanges), then several states might just play along. If that happens, we would have a golden opportunity to discover the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches. Unfortunately, I suspect that this legislation will not give states enough time to act or enough money to make it worth their while, and the vast majority of states will leave the problem of financing and implementing health reform to the feds.Continue reading…
By DAVID E. WILLIAMS
One of the interesting things I learned in business school is that not only is it typical for a business to earn 80 percent of its profits from 20 percent of its customers, but that 75 percent of its customers may represent 120 percent of its profit. In other words, not only are some customers more profitable than others, but a fair fraction of the customer base is unprofitable. This kind of pattern is evident in a normal (i.e., non-health care) business. The main drivers are usually cost of customer acquisition and cost to serve. For example, some customers demand a lot more service than others and some customers that cost a lot to bring on only buy once. Price is usually a secondary factor, with more powerful or shrewder customers negotiating discounts.
Once businesses understand their true costs and profitability by customer segment they can take steps to improve profitability. For example, if customers recruited through advertising on Facebook are unprofitable, the company can advertise elsewhere. If some customers use a lot of service, the company can start charging for service explicitly.
Health care is a lot weirder than that, as Ambulance-Bill Chasing in the Sunday Boston Globe Magazine illustrates. A non-health care person wrote about how he tried to understand the bills for his mother’s ambulance rides to and from the hospital. The more he dug, the more bewildered he became:
As a reporter, I’m used to dealing with complex material, but this drive down one of the countless, curvy roads that merge into the Health Cost Superhighway left me both more informed and more confused. Maybe it really is easier to remain clueless and indifferent about our medical bills. The alternative, as a friend who has spent decades in the health care trenches told me, is “to be clueless and terrified.”Continue reading…
By MERRILL GOOZNER
Experimentation in how states would move toward universal health care coverage was written into the DNA of the Affordable Care Act. The law allowed any state to petition for a waiver that would enable it to enact its own brand of reform — including versions that did not include an individual mandate to purchase coverage or penalize employers who didn’t provide it – as long as their plans met the basic criteria of the law in terms of covering most people, providing comprehensive coverage, being affordable, and not increasing the federal deficit.
President Obama yesterday offered to move up the date for states that want to pursue their own visions of reform from 2017 to 2014. Stories in today’s press billed this as an effort by the administration to assuage conservative critics who’ve filed suit against the law and governors from both political parties who fear its economic impact. Medicaid expansion accounts for about half of the newly covered people under reform. Even with the feds picking up 90 percent of the tab, many states in today’s fiscal environment are wary of any new obligations — even one where they’re only on the hook for 10 percent.
As I wrote last month, leaving states to implement reform provides Americans with a classic example of federalism in action, one that may or may not lead to a common system across the U.S. In the early part of the 20th century, states began setting up unemployment and workers compensation insurance systems. The former became a shared federal-state responsibility with common features across the U.S. The latter remained unique to each state. Ohio, for instance, has a single-payer workers compensation system and insurance companies are prohibited from selling policies in the state.Continue reading…
By JOHN MOORE
Over a 1,000 exhibitors, some 30,000+ attendees and I come away from HIMSS, again, thinking is this all there is? Where is the innovation that the Obama administration i.e., Sec. Sebellius and Dr. Blumenthal both touted in their less than inspiring keynotes on Wednesday morn? Maybe I had my blinders on, maybe I was looking in the wrong places but honestly, outside of the expected, we now have an iPad App for that type of innovation where nearly every EHR vendor has an iPad App for the EHR, or will be realeasing such this year, I just didn’t see anything that really caught my attention. But then again, looking over my posts from previous HIMSS (this was my fourth), maybe my expectations need a serious reset and it would be wise of me to read this post next year before I get on the plane to Las Vegas and HIMSS’12.
Prior to HIMSS I participated in a webinar put on by mobihealthnews (BTW, Brian at mobi has a good article on some of those mobile apps being rolled out at HIMSS this year). My role in this webinar was to give an overview of what one might expect at HIMSS’11. Having weathered the last two HIMSS and the major hype in ’09 about Meaningful Use and ’10 when HIEs were all the rage, this year I predicted that the big hype would be around ACOs. Much to my surprise such was not the case.
The reason was quite simple and two-fold.Continue reading…
For the uninitiated, every year HIMSS runs a big huge trade show for EHR and HIT vendors, which is to the HIT industry what Oscar night is to Hollywood. No, HIMSS does not award any prizes or trophies, but it occasions the same breath taking congregation of all industry glitterati in one place, complete with clever little parties and big extravagant shows. There were well over 30,000 people at this year’s HIMSS11 conference, and although I wasn’t one of them, I made sure to follow the events through the steady Twitter stream and many excellent blogs, reports and interviews, because what happens at HIMSS is good indication for what the HIT industry is doing and where it is going. So to summarize all the excitement, the established HIT folks are doing Meaningful Use, which has become yesterday’s news, with HIE being the next project on the books. Everything is being pushed to tablets and the cutting edge innovations are all about a myriad of small Mobile Health (mHealth) applications. Analytics and business intelligence is looming large on a horizon filled with provider consolidation, capitation and value-based medicine.
On the surface, this seems a very logical succession of events. Meaningful Use is collecting data, HIE will make it liquid and, as predicted, 1000 flowers of innovative mobile applications will eventually be blooming to bring the liquid data to consumers and innovators who will slice and dice it to provide us all with unimaginable medical utility. However, in the excitement of anticipation on those balmy Florida nights, it is easy to overlook the fact that this entire chain of events is based on one assumption: somewhere, somehow, someone will have to enter data into the system, consistently, accurately and in minute detail. For free. Is there a problem here?Continue reading…
By ROBERT LASZEWSKI
Conservatives are in a full court press these days telling us the answer to America’s out-of-control health care costs—and our fiscal crisis—is to move Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax code subsidy for private insurance to a defined contribution system.
Instead of the federal government defining a benefit and then shouldering the cost of whatever that promise leads to (today’s defined benefit plan), many conservatives are suggesting that we gradually move to a system where the government only promises an annual payment (or tax credit) for health care in the form of a voucher and then the consumer uses it (arguably more efficiently) to buy one of many health plans competing for their business.
First, let me tell you that I think defined contribution health care is generally a good idea. For too long the federal tax system and Medicare policy has subsidized careless health care spending.
Many worry that defined contribution health care would lead to poor people getting second-class health care because they would not be able to afford more than the voucher allows them. That is a legitimate concern and while that outcome can be tempered it cannot likely be eliminated. But that also occurs today, as many seniors have nothing more than a combination of Medicare and Medicaid while the wealthier can afford much better supplemental insurance. And, it will occur in the future under the Affordability Act because the new federal health care subsidies are based on the more limited plans available.
But I will also tell you that it is naïve to think the way to control health care costs is to simply move to a more market-oriented defined health care system.Continue reading…
Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, talked with Matthew about mergers, consolidation and payment changes taking place in the healthcare system.
By JOHN GOODMAN
I have not been able to determine how you pronounce the acronym for Accountable Care Organization (ACO). Is it ā´ ko? Or ā´ so? Or ăh so´, as in Charlie Chan movies? What about ĕ´ ko, as in a canyon? Or simply ick, with a silent o?
Anyway, this is not a trivial matter because you are likely to be in an ACO at some point in the future and it’s probably going to happen sooner than you think.
In Massachusetts, stakeholders are already meeting to develop a plan to push everyone with commercial insurance into an ACO. [Can you guess who doesn’t count as a “stakeholder?” If you live in Massachusetts and you weren’t invited to the meeting, that’s a clue.] Nationwide, Medicare will start paying fees to ACOs, beginning next year. Eventually, the Obama administration would like to see everyone in an ACO.
But if no one had any previous interest in forming ACOs, let alone joining them, what is going to cause us all to change our minds? Money. Insurers won’t be able to get premium increases unless they adopt ACO plans. Doctors and hospitals will be paid less if they don’t join. Eventually doctors will find they are ineligible to treat Medicare patients or patients insured in the newly-created health insurance exchanges if they are not practicing in ACOs. As for the patients, there won’t be any plans to join other than ACO plans.Continue reading…
By MICHAEL KIRSCH, MD
Many folks criticize pharmaceutical companies for providing physicians’ offices with free drug samples. They claim that this giveaway harms consumers because drug companies must raise their prices to cover the costs of these freebies. Of course, this is undeniable. Any business expense, such as payroll or advertising, has to be covered and is expectedly borne by the consumer. If a company chooses not to advertise, outsources manufacturing to a country with cheaper labor, offers limited benefits to its employees, then they can sell their product at a low price. In this hypothetical example, anemic sales may doom the company quickly.
Naturally, free samples are not really free. The rest of us pay for them. While this is true, I don’t think it is evil. Unlike the U.S. government, at least drug companies are covering their costs and not simply borrowing money every year to meet budget. Interesting concept.
Two of the community hospitals I work at have undergone transformations. One is owned by the dominant health care behemoth in Cleveland and has just completed a near $200 million renovation and expansion. The other smaller hospital is one of the few remaining Cleveland area hospitals that are still independent. I’d like to sneak there at night and hoist up a ‘Live Free or Die’ flag up the flagpole, to celebrate its independent streak, but I’m sure that there are video cameras everywhere and that I would be in violation of several bylaws. The apt punishment might be that I would have to spend a cold Cleveland night chained to the flagpole reading electronic medical record manuals out loud.Continue reading…
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