Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“This isn’t about big brother telling people what to do,” says John Rice, GE’s vice-chairman, “but helping them make better choices.” The Economist reviews large employers efforts to improve employee health and thus decrease their own health care costs. Some of these efforts include: Prohibiting smoking on company premises Handing our healthy recipes Building on-site…
Caregiving robots. Obesity Epidemic (not what you think) A State where marijuana is almost legal but caffeinated beer is not. Old people are ruining America. 3 HR = 2 facials?
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Joe Paduda’s Managed Care Matters.
The Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System (MPSMS) is a national surveillance project aimed at identifying the rates of specific adverse events within the Medicare population. It is administered by the Quality Improvement Group (QIG) in the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality (OCSQ). The goal of the project is not to monitor physicians for best practices or…
One of the challenges of studying import issues in health economics is that the patients often come in and out of your data file. For instance, beneficiaries often switch their private health insurance plan, or can become eligible for public insurance (e.g., Medicare or Medicaid) or the individual may lose their insurace coverage. In each…
Massachusetts’ Medicaid program instituted a pay-for-performance program in 2008. Did it work? According to this paper, the answer is no. MassHealth P4P Background The MassHealth pay-for-perfrmance P4P program was implemented in 2008. At first the program was implmented using a P4P structure for pneumonia and pay-for-reporting for surgical infection prevention (SIP) and transitioning to P4P…
Today, I will review Brazil’s health care system. According to the Economist: “Created in 1989 from the merger of two state systems, one for those in formal work and the other for everyone else, it is exceptional in Latin America, which by and large continues with the two-tier public system Brazil abandoned. The 1988 constitution…