Category: Uncategorized

What is the Basic Health Plan (BHP)? Stan Dorn of the Urban Institute explains: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers states the option to implement the Basic Health Program (BHP). BHP gives states 95 percent of what the federal government would have spent on tax credits and subsidies for out-of-pocket costs for…

The best diseases, from a business point of view, would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally–that is, for maximum profit–the patient should either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation. Crake, from Oryx and Crake: A Novel by Margaret Atwood.

Its has been well established that medical errors are a serious problem in modern health care.  One study found that medical errors kill between 50k and 100k annually and another found that 2.9% of people who enter the hospital are actually harmed by the care they receive.  The most recent issue of  Health Affairs, however, has found…

Do HDHP reduce spending? Pfizer breakup? Farming, nutrition, and health. Pay for Non-Performance. Addiction website. Top 100+ Economists. Ticket scalping, payment=kidneys.

The MassHealth P4P program was implemented in 2008.  The program began with a P4P incentive for pneumonia treatment and a pay-for-reporting incentive for surgical infection prevention.  In 2009, hospitals were eligible for P4P payments for both measures. Nevertheless, the effect of the MassHealth on P4P was practically non-existent. What happened? Today we review an article by…

An excerpt from Monocle Magazine‘s February Issue, p. 58 in which I am quoted: “Syracuse is a healthcare hub.  A state teaching hospital and a non-profit community hospital, two of the city’s four largest employers, for a stable base of high-paying jobs in hard times.  But  having a hospital as a leading employer can often…

Logue: They’re idiots. Prince: They’ve all been knighted. Logue: Makes it official then. From The King’s Speech

Where do we spend our health care dollars?  A paper by Conway et al. in Health Services Research examines this question using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) from 2007.  Typically, statistics break down health expenditures by payer (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance) or setting (e.g., inpatient, outpatient, nursing home). “However, this is not…

Pay-for-performance schemes have been attracting much attention of late. A RWJF policy paper from 2007 provides a nice overview of various P4P design considerations. Below, I summarize some of the key findings of this article. Timeline Early 1990s.  Cost control measures in the early 1990s began a shift for rewarding physicians for specific actions.  …