The Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists and 9 other scribbler groups have asked the Food and Drug Administration to lift its requirement that agency officials first get permission from the public relations office before speaking with reporters. The demand came in a letter sent to Principal Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, who is running the FDA's Transparency Task Force.
Good idea. In fact, it should be extended to every government agency.
Healthcare journo Neil Versel almost defends Deb Peel as she rants inanely about PHR vendors. What she and her gang of nutjobs want is to hide behind privacy to prevent potentially lifesaving used of health data because they hate “the government”. More of my disparagement here
@contagionhealth Dunno. It may be my end or yours. Been having lots of trouble logging in from Tweetdeck. But that was from twitter.com
Health 2.0 will be launching a webinar series next year…leading to much good natured internal bickering this morning. Look out world!
Starting a flame war with @SusannahFox because I can’t get Tweetdeck to work and therefore feeling grumpy
I was struck during President Obama’s health care speech before Congress several months ago that the reforms he advocates would not go into effect for four years, until 2014. This timetable, too, is written into both the House and Senate versions.
Why the delay? It is hard for me to imagine, even given the federal rulemaking process, that it should take four years to establish an insurance exchange from which people can buy coverage. This is the exchange that would eliminate the nasty practices of insurance companies: Denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions; limiting annual or lifetime payments; and rescission of policies. It is hard for me to imagine, too, why it should take four years to fully deliver targeted subsidies to lower income people so they can afford insurance.
As noted by Princeton Professor Paul Starr in an article in the New York Times earlier this week: “By comparison, when Medicare was enacted in 1965, it went into effect the next year.”
This leaves me with a bad feeling. It looks like the Obama team does not want implementation of the health care bill to take place during their first term. Why? Perhaps they know that the cost of the plan is higher than they are saying. Or maybe they know that the options available to consumers will be less attractive than currently portrayed.
On December 1, 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report entitled To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Although its authors hoped to spark a national movement, they had little cause for optimism. After all, early efforts by advocates like Berwick and Leape and organizations like the National Patient Safety Foundation had barely moved the needle of public and professional attention.
The IOM Report succeeded beyond its framers’ wildest dreams, and the movement they spawned turns ten today. Please indulge me while I spend a nostalgic moment recalling the remarkable spin that launched the patient safety field. I’ll then segue to a summary of my assessment of what we’ve accomplished over the past decade (I outline this more fully in an article in this week’s web version of Health Affairs, which I hope you’ll take a look at).Continue reading…
By JEFF GOLDSMITH
President Obama has promised not to sign any health reform legislation that increases the federal deficit. This promise recognized rising public concern about an Argentinean fiscal trend that, unchecked, could leave us with $19 trillion in federal debt in a decade.
Without that pledge, given the current economic climate, health reform would be one dead mackerel.
Some clarifications are essential here. I’m a Democrat and fervent Obama supporter. I voted for him twice (and that was just in the Virginia primary). I’m proud of our President. He has first class economic and healthcare teams. He deserves credit for not postponing health reform. He’s right: it’s simply not tolerable, morally or economically, for a wealthy nation to continue having close to 50 million uninsured people.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report today saying that if the Reid bill becomes law, the price of non group policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than it would be under current law. The CBO projects that small group and large group premiums would be about the same in 2016 as they would have been anyway as the benefits of the bill would offset some of its new costs.
But what is likely to happen to health insurance rates in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 before any of the bill’s benefits occur for both the insurance markets and consumers?
I would suggest Democrats not overlook the potential for political fallout in those years.
By delaying the start of most health insurance reform benefits—including insurance subsidies and underwriting reforms—until January 1, 2014 the Reid health care bill creates a real risk of unintended political consequences for the Democrats.
Or, maybe I should have said almost certain consequences that Reid may not have thought of.
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