The Health Care Blog – Page 957 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Maxing out on health reform

Nov 13, 2008• 12

By Sarah Arnquist Sarahmug

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’ unveiling of a health reform proposal yesterday fed speculation about the possibility of Democrats tackling health reform from the get-go of the new Administration.

The Montana Democrat’s proposal is detailed in an 97-page "call to action" document. In his letter of introduction, Baucus says the plan is not a legislative proposal but his vision for policy reforms and the political process.

Baucus says the plan will require an initial investment, but doesn’t name how much. There are no cost figures in the plan, but the Senator writes, "It is my intention that
after ten years the U.S. will spend no more on health care than is
currently projected, but we will spend those resources more
efficiently, and will provide better-quality coverage to all Americans."

Baucus to unveil reform proposal with individual mandate

Nov 12, 2008• 6

By Sarah Arnquist

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max
Baucus (D-Mont) will unveil today his plan to overhaul the U.S. health care system.

Laura Meckler, of The Journal, reports the plan is very similar to the one Obama touted on the campaign trail with one major exception: Baucus wants to require all individuals to buy health insurance.

Given this, one could probably more accurately say the plan resembles Sen. Hillary Clinton’s plan. Where is Clinton in these discussions? Time has an update on the health care reform veteran.

Here’s what Jonathan Cohn has to say about Clinton’s involvement: "Exactly what role Clinton can play remains unclear, since she doesn’t
have the committee seniority to assert herself the way, say, Baucus or
Kennedy does. But she remains one of the most visible and, on health
care, one of the most trusted policymakers in Washington. If she wants
to say something, she’ll be heard. And that’s a good thing."

For background on the Senate’s health plans, see Jonathan Cohn’s article in the New Republic.

Will Democrats muck up any chance for health reform?

Nov 12, 2008• 1

&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://www.buzzdash.com/index.php?page=buzzbite&amp;amp;BB_id=130601&amp;quot;&amp;gt;Will Democrats muck up health reform by infighting and power plays?&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; | &amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://www.buzzdash.com&amp;quot;&amp;gt;BuzzDash polls&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</center>

Will layoffs take us closer to single-payer?

Nov 12, 2008• 12

By David E. Williams Davidwilliams

Only a few months ago, Goldman Sachs was touted as an incredible
bastion of strength in the face of the credit crunch. Sure some other
institutions might have been suffering, but Goldman was savvy enough to
earn record profits in 2007. The average bonus was a whopping $600,000 per employee.
Then very suddenly Goldman and pretty much the whole industry
collapsed. The federal government has stepped in, and a partial
nationalization of the financial industry is underway. That’s not the
free market, it’s socialism.

While actual socialism was being carried out by the Republican
Administration in Washington, out on the campaign trail, McCain and
Palin were bashing Obama for allegedly socialistic policy proposals,
namely rolling back the Bush tax cuts for high earners. Obviously the
voters didn’t buy it.

Thanks to the credit crisis, companies and non-profits are starting
to lay people off. My inbox is filling up with messages from people
who’ve been given the sack and are searching for their next gig. Today
I received such a notice from a close friend at Goldman Sachs itself.

Getting value from medical devices

Nov 12, 2008• 1

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

The buyers of medical devices aren’t very good shoppers. They lack the kind of information about technologies that would help them make value-based purchasing decisions, according to James Robinson in the most recent issue of Health Affairs.

This issue is so important because medical technology is the No. 1 factor driving up health spending in the U.S., according to the Center for Studying Health System Change in their recent report, High and Rising Health Care Costs: Demystifying U.S. Health Care Spending.

What are medical devices? They’re the hardware used by surgeons and clinicians in curing, cobbling together, stabilizing, and managing patients’ medical challenges. They cover orthopedics, interventional cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, and neurosurgery. The technologies represented here are collectively known as “physician preference items.” They can account for one-third of overall hospital supply costs and are growing as a percent of total costs according to the Financial Leadership Council of the Advisory Board. They have an FDA-designed life cycle, as shown in the figure.

Health 2.0’s impact on the digital divide

Nov 11, 2008• 7

By Gilles Frydman Gilles

For too many years, I’ve witnessed the same thing. First, it was in the ACOR system. Then it occurred in many conferences about eHealth, e-Patients, and now Health 2.0 and the Connected Health symposium
at Harvard Medical School.

Why is an entire segment of the U.S.
population almost completely absent from the fast evolving world of
Health 2.0 and Participatory Medicine?

The uneasiness has consistently grown since 2004 when we ran our first large in-house survey and discovered
that over 98% of our users are Caucasians and less than 1 percent are African
Americans. It is too easy for all of us to forget about this disturbing
fact.

CAP’s Blueprint for reform

Nov 11, 2008• 2

By Joshua Seidman Siedman

The Center for American Progress (CAP) released a new “Blueprint for Reform” that focuses on how to fix the delivery system. This well-constructed
document and provocative forum was spearheaded by CAP CEO John Podesta (former Clinton White House Chief of Staff) and Jeanne Lambrew.

There are a few things that really show good progress in the
national debate. First, the fact that CAP has chosen this critical time
at the precipice of the national health care reform debate to focus
attention on reforming care as well as coverage will be helpful to
facilitating that discussion in 2009 policy debates (they, of course,
support coverage initiatives as well but those aren’t addressed in this
document).

Second, the quality and thougtfulness of the work and recommendations is high. Not surprising given the exceptional collection of authors with each chapter co-authored by a physician and a policy expert. These
include: Don Berwick, Tom Lee, Judy Hibbard, David Blumenthal, Bob
Berenson, Paul Ginsberg, Steve Schroeder, Dora Hughes, Chiquita
Brooks-LaSure, Karen Davenport, and Katherine Hayes.

Hypermimesis and Healthcare 2.0 – Guidelines for Building Contagiously Healthy Social Networks

Nov 11, 2008• 18

By Jim Walker

“Contagious” is an interesting word, especially when used outside the world of health care, carrying both positive and negative connotations, such as, “her laughter was contagious” or “a financial contagion has hit the markets.”

Of course, within health care “contagious” almost always has negative connotations – “that strain of flu is rather contagious” or “ebola hemorrhagic fever is highly contagious and kills approximately 50 to 90 percent of all people infected." There was even a recent study published by NEJM showing that obesity within social networks is contagious. The social network map that accompanied the study is literally covered with dozens of interconnected, rather plump yellow dots. The skinny dots wedged in-between were apparently feeling a lot of social pressure to eat a second or third doughnut!

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler who conducted the obesity research noted that “we find that a person’s chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if they have a friend who becomes obese, 40% if they have a sibling who becomes obese, and 37% if a spouse becomes obese.”

Unfortunately, their related research showing healthy behaviors within social networks are also contagious has received much less media attention. In analyzing the Framingham cohort for smoking cessation, they noticed some remarkable trends:

…there appear to have been local smoking-cessation cascades, since whole connected clusters within the social network stopped smoking roughly in concert. This finding suggests that decisions to quit smoking are not made solely by isolated persons, but rather they reflect choices made by groups of people connected to each other both directly and indirectly at up to three degrees of separation. People appeared to act under collective pressures within niches in the network.

MD Rating Sites: Current State of the Space and Future Prospects

Nov 10, 2008• 24

By Ruth Given

Ruth Given has spent the last few months doing an exhaustive study of the physician ratings business. Ruth is an independent health economist and consultant who has in the past worked for Kaiser, the California Medical Association and Deloitte Consulting. We’re very happy to make her study available on THCB and the Health 2.0 Blog. You can download the full report at the end of this introductory article — Matthew Holt

The past few years have seen an explosion in growth of websites allowing patients to review/rate (usually rant or rave about) their health care providers. Recent mainstream media attention has focused on the rating of physicians, with over 30 such sites now operating. A few sites, including RateMDs and Healthgrades, have been around for a number of years, but several high profile initiatives were recently launched. Last fall, national health plan Anthem announced that it would be partnering with restaurant rater Zagat to allow its enrollees to rate their MDs online. And in April, Angie’s List, whose subscribers rate a wide variety of local service companies, began to include all types of health care providers, including physicians.

Physician reaction to these sites has been generally unenthusiastic; but there is currently very little MDs can do legally to stop patients from posting opinions about them online. While this approach to reporting on MD performance has its shortcomings, there is also a growing recognition of the importance of accounting for patient experience in evaluating quality of care. The federal government, through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is moving to collect patient experience-related feedback, such as that included in their annual consumer assessment of hospitals reports. An AHRQ/Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey tool on patients’ experience with physicians has also been developed and is currently in use in a number of settings.

Given the recent ramp-up in sites and their newly legitimized role, the future for online MD rating seems fairly rosy. But is this really the case?

Proposal for a THCB Healthcare Reform Effort

Nov 10, 2008• 22

By Deron Schriver

THCB regular reader Deron Schriver wants THCB readers to suggest plans to reform the health care system. Here’s his appeal:

I enjoy many of the discussions on THCB. Intelligent people from all vantage points of the health care system congregate to engage in conversations about the most important issues out there. What if there was a way to translate those discussions into treatment plans for the ailments of our health care system?

Meaningful, sustainable reform can only come from a collection of people from the various stakeholder positions (physicians, patients, insurance companies, employers, etc.) who see what’s working and what isn’t on a daily basis. Politicians do not have the exposure to the system that is needed to prescribe effective solutions. However, they are in a good position to assist in the implementation of well-designed solutions.

We need to approach reform much like a physician approaches an ill patient. That involves obtaining some history, examining the system, and then prescribing a treatment plan. It would require a progress note, similar to what a physician uses, in order to document our work. After all, “if it wasn’t documented, it wasn’t done”. All problems considered should be discussed by all stakeholders until solutions are developed that 1) are thorough, 2) treat the problem and not the symptoms, and 3) are not zero sum. We need to follow the system all the way from the time the patient enrolls in an insurance plan, to the time she is treated by her physician, to the time the claim is paid (or not paid).