Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Thursday’s edition of the New York Times contained an article (“British Clinic is Allowed to Deny Medicine“) describing how a British court ruled that local health authorities could deny coverage of a breast cancer medicine since it was not yet approved. The drug in question is Herceptin. “Herceptin, made by Roche, is currently licensed for…
While most Americans envy the Canadian single payer system, Canadians may be looking south for inspiration to reform their health care system. Today’s Vancouver Sun reports that: British Columbia’s Liberal government is launching a sweeping review of medicare, promising to let citizens decide if they want a health care system that might feature even more…
Forbes magazine reports that William W. McGuire, CEO of UnitedHealth Group) received compensation of $124.8 million in 2005. Managed Care Magazine also says that the average executive compensation (excluding unexercised stock options) for an executive of a ‘top 10 for profit health plan’ was $11.7 million and that was back in 2000. Are these high…
General Electric (my employer between 2002-2004) unveiled an interesting program named ‘Bridges to Excellence.’ This program will compensate participating physicians up to $50 per patient in exchanged for instituting IT systemts for patient records, electronic prescription writing, etc. GE estimtates that the $50/patient figure will be about half of the projected savings from the project. …
In the State of the Union address, President Bush dedicated portions of the speech to the health care problems facing the United States. A summary of his proposals is located on the White House website. I will comment on a few noteworthy additions to the Bush plan, of which I was not aware of during my…
A 31 January 2006 Times article (“Smaller is better, says minister in hospitals shake-up“) states that the National Health Service (NHS) hopes to increase the number of small in the UK to counter the trend of recent hospital closings. Is this a good policy? Let’s look at the Pros and Cons: Pros: Smaller, more numerous…
A January 26th New York Times article (“Prognosis is Mixed for Health Savings“) gives a brief summary of the results of the Health Savings Account (HSA) legislation enacted in 2003. The HSA allows individuals to contribute to a health care savings account using pre-tax dollars; a mechanism for savings is similar to a 401(k). In…
Today’s health care debate in the popular press can be boiled down to the following few points: Health Care is too expensive and we need to make it more ‘affordable,’ While reducing the price, we must maintain individual choice of which physicians they wish to see and which procedures they desire. Switching from a fee-for-service…
A recent article in Nature (“The Scaling Laws of Human Travel“) claims that the flow of money may provide a good model of how diseases spread in modern society. Previous models of how pandemics generally thought that the dispersion would occur slowly over a contiguous geographic region. As air travel becomes more and more common…
The Washington Post reports that President George W. Bush will offer âNew Tax Breaks for Medical Expensesâ? in his State of the Union speech on January 31 at 9pm ET. Part of this proposal is to make personal expenditures on health expenditures tax deductible and to expand health savings accounts. When examining the health insurance…