Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Dr. Richard N. Fogoros has a very interesting website named, the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare, which relates his views about health care. His analysis is systematic. One is able to understand the health care system from the point of view of physicians, patients, health plans, the government, and employers. His “Pathway # 2 to…
As my colleague Mike Ewens wrote to me: “Monopolists hate competitors and have to use the government to keep them away.” An example that takes center stage can be found in a recent Chicago Tribune article (“AMA takes on Retail Clinics“) . Some doctors have asked the AMA to ban on in-store clinics currently being…
The concept of pay-for-performance has been discussed repeatedly in this blog. But what about the other P4P: pay-for-participation? In the pay for participation model, payers compensate physicians to add infrastructure or partake in data collection. For instance, a health plan may pay providers to implement an electronic medical records system. Providers may also compensate physicians…
Externalities are a basic concept in the economics of health care. Yet actual ACIP policies do not pay significant attention to externality issues. The rationale for vaccination recommendations often doesn’t consider strategies to target sub-populations, such as school children, that are most likely to generate negative externalities by spreading the disease. A paper by Boulier,…
Pay-for-performance (P4P) is one of the latest hot topics in the health policy world. Yet it has not been conclusively answered whether or not P4P incentives affect the quality of care given. Meredith Rosenthal and Richard Frank review some of the more compelling empirical studies in their April 2006 paper in Medical Care Research &…
What issues are facing primary care physicians in the near future? A nice article by Eugene Rich and Anna Maio discusses just this topic in their paper “Late to the Feast: Primary Care and US Health Policy.” Some issues discussed are: How FFS payment systems compare to prepaid-group practice with regards to the type of…
Although there have been quality improvements in nursing home care over time, most elderly (including my own grandmother) dread the thought of entering a nursing home. According to a Mattimore et al. (J Am Geriatrics Soc 1997) study only 7% of patients surveyed were “very willing” to live permanently in a nursing home, while 26%…
Generic drugs dramatically reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals to patients. Can generic medical devices reduce the cost for hospital administrators? Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog interviews Richard Kuntz, CEO of Generic Medical Devices. Mr. Kuntz wants to reduce the cost of the implants, surgical implementation, and supplies used in medical care. The company…
âCan you imagine if a Wal-Mart store operated like Americaâs health care system? You would walk into the store and there would be a huge array of merchandise. But you would not be able to tell the products apart. You would not know how much they cost. And in the end, you would not know…
There is an interesting post at GoozNews (“Getting Doctors to Compete“) in which Merrill Goozner comments on Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter’s belief that competition and integrated care are the solutions to the nation’s health care woes. “Where we need to go is an integrated practice model,” he said. His model entails patient-focused practice…