CoR is up
Rebecca Shafer of AMAXX turns in another great roundup of risky posts in this week’s Cavalcade of Risk.
Month: September 2014
Employers lose interest in providing health insurance
Recent reforms have lead more and more employers to shift employees to health insurance exchanges. A PwC report states: Thirty-two percent of employers are considering moving their active employees to a private exchange in the next three years, according to PwC’s 2014 Touchstone survey of 1,200 employers. Many employers already offer online tools similar to…
Health IT in Four Countries
How have different countries developed their health IT systems? A paper by Adler-Milstein et. al in Health Affairs provides some insight. I summarize their findings below. Australia. In the 1990s-early 2000s, the government supported the adoption of EHRs through federal incentives to general practitioners. These efforts focused primarily on EHRs with e-prescribing. In 2005 the…
HWR + More
David Williams hosts this week’s Health Work Review at the Health Business Blog. If you need more entertainment for the end of your week, check out the links below as well. Eradicating Ebola in 100 days. Teachers with coding skills. Using social media to track adverse events. Uber goes to Lambeau. “…unless they get paid…
The Apple Watch and Health
Apple recently unveiled its smart watch. The watch not only is a mini-computer, but it can help improve your health. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktujsc4ZUTo Pharmafile reports: The watch comes with an app that promises to calculate all kinds of data including heart rate, calories burned and other metrics in one place – and can also count how many…
Will Obamacare Increase the share of Part-Time Workers?
The ACA requires large employers to provide coverage to all full-time workers. However, providing insurance is costly. Will employers avoid this requirement by hiring more part-time workers? An Urban Institute report claims that this is not the case. We find no evidence that the ACA had already started increasing part-time work before 2014. We find…
Health Insurance and ER Use
One of the big political selling points of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was that by providing people with health insurance, they can get the primary care they need and avoid expensive ER visits. While the expansion of health insurance never claimed to be cost savings, did the ACA reduce ER visits? A paper by…
Docs benefiting from Medicaid Expansions
PwC’s Health Research Institute reports that times are good if you are a safety net provider in a state that expanded Medicaid coverage: Physicians, hospitals and health systems operating in the 26 states and the District of Columbia that pursued the option to broaden Medicaid coverage with federal dollars have seen a significant rise in…
1 in 5 dollars of the US economy to be spent on healthcare by 2023
CMS Office of the Actuary (OACT) projects that the slowdown in healthcare spending will not last. From an article in Health Affairs this month: In 2013 health spending growth is expected to have remained slow, at 3.6 percent, as a result of the sluggish economic recovery, the effects of sequestration, and continued increases in private…
Capitalism vs. Competition
Nevertheless, devaluing competition is a central theme of Thiel’s new book. He asserts that “capitalism and competition are opposites,” because “under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.” He exhorts entrepreneurs to seek out monopolies, concluding, “All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are…