Friday Links
Polio-like illness hits the Bay Area. Calculate your Obamacare tax credit. Do you really want to win the lottery? Are obesity rates really falling? Fat drug?
Month: February 2014
HWR: In like a lion edition
The latest edition of the HWR is up at David Harlow’s HealthBlawg. Check it out.
Use of Medicaid in old age
Many health care wonks know that Medicaid covers long-term care for poor elderly individuals. However, the impact of Medicaid among the elderly may be underappreciated. As a paper by Di Nardi, French and Jones, finds: Among respondents in the lowest quintile of lifetime income, nearly seventy percent are receiving Medicaid at age 74. Medicaid use…
Free Heroin?
Giving away heroin may sound like a good plan for a start-up drug dealer.; get new customers hooked and them make money off their addiction. Drug dealers aren’t the only ones considering giving heroin away for free; so are some European governments. The Economist reports: Over the past two decades many have come to favour…
Friday Links
How to run a hospital. A colonoscopy pill. PhARMA’s reputation. Just turn the damn thing in. Richest man in all of history.
Health Care Quotations of the Day
“If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny.” ― Thomas Jefferson “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.” ― Walter Cronkite
CoR is up
Jeff Rose hosts this week’s round-up of risk-related posts. From insurance riders to self-funding, data breaches and tobacco sales, there’s sure to be something to pique your interest in the latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk at Life Insurance by Jeff.
PhARMA’s reputation
The pharma industry’s reputation is getting worse. Pharmafile reports that “35.4% said that multinational pharma companies had either an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ reputation in 2013. While this is about the same result as in 2012, it is well below 2011 when 41% of respondents gave that answer.” Below are the 2013 reputation rankings for different…
30-day readmission rates
AHRQ has put together a nice infographic, which I show below.
Does putting health care report cards online matter?
Pennsylvania, through the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), has been a pioneer in developing performance grades on Coronary Artery Bypass Craft Surgery for health care providers and posting them online. Although PHC4 has published Pennsylvania’s Guide to Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery since the early 1990s, these documents were paper documents and potentially…