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Can Effective Health Care Reform Occur In This Geographically Varied Country?

There is a romantic view of America as a homogeneous nation – a nation that is flat. But the real America has high peaks of affluence and deep valleys of poverty and a varied landscape of health care spending. It is a hilly terrain of income inequality.

The Affordable Care Act was based on homogeneity. Not only would its provisions be disseminated equally, but smoothing the peaks and valleys of health care utilization would liberate the funds necessary to finance it. Under reform, Newark would come to resemble Grand Junction CO, and Mayo would be the model for Manhattan. No longer would Los Angeles, home to the nation’s largest concentration of poverty, consume more resources than Green Bay, WI, where poverty is infrequent. Regional variation in income and poverty could be ignored all together. The problem is “practice variation,” and health care reform will fix that.

Of course, the US  is not homogeneous, and poverty cannot be ignored. In fact, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at PHYSICIANS and HEALTH CARE REFORM Commentaries and Controversies*

Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute: Just Another AHRQ?

If you want to grow the expense of health care delivery in America very quickly, then create two government agencies to do the same job.

From the 28 September 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, we read about a small paragraph in our new health care law that created the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). From that same article, here’s the PCORI’s mission:

PCORI responds to a widespread concern (eds note: emphasis mine. Really? What about the internet?) that, in many cases, patients and their health care providers, families, and caregivers do not have the information they need to make choices aligned with their desired health outcomes.

PCORI funding is set at a total of $210 million for the first 3 years and increases to approximately $350 million in 2013 and $500 million annually from 2014 through 2019. With more than $3 billion to spend between now and the end of the decade, PCORI will support many studies encompassing a broad range of study designs and outcomes that are relevant to patients, aiming to assist people in making choices that are consistent with their values, preferences, and goals.

We should recall that Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Priority Problems: The Failure Of Government Aid

I recently saw a teenage boy with headaches.  His father, wringing his hands, said that the headaches had been present for two years; but that the child had never been evaluated for them.  No imaging, no neurologist.  No insurance, of course.

A family friend, another child, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  The family of my patient was terrified.  Where to turn?  They were, reasonably, concerned about cost.

Contrast that with the woman I saw on state assistance. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

Can We Really Eliminate Waste In The Healthcare System?

A recurring theme of the CRB is that the rising cost of healthcare is the main internal threat to the continued viability of the US. Indeed, the very title of this blog reflects the chief mechanism which is being employed, fruitlessly and disastrously, in the attempt to reduce those costs.

Recently, DrRich pointed out that there are four ways – and only four ways – to reduce the cost of healthcare. He did this as a service to his readers, so that when politicians describe in their weaselly language how they will get the cost of healthcare under control, you will be able to figure out which of the four methods they are actually talking about.

While DrRich’s synthesis has been generally well-received, a few readers did offer one particular objection. DrRich, they assert, left out a fifth way to reduce the cost of healthcare, and the very best way at that. Namely, just get rid of the waste and inefficiency.

DrRich has talked about this before, but obviously it is time to revisit the issue.

It is, in fact, a central assumption of any healthcare reform plan ever proposed that we can get our spending under control simply by eliminating – or at least substantially reducing – the vast amount of waste and inefficiency in the healthcare system. Conservatives propose to do this by Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*

I’m Glad Economists Aren’t Practicing Medicine

I was invited to speak at the National Library of Medicine’s 2010 Annual Conference. Today I heard fellow speaker Uwe Reinhardt, Ph.D., discuss healthcare economics, and although his presentation was entertaining, as a physician I found it to be rather disturbing.

On the one hand I understand Reinhardt’s desire to engage Americans in a rational conversation about limited healthcare resources. My friend Dr. Rich Fogoros has been calling for this for many years. Yet, I was disappointed by his enthusiastic reductionism — that peoples’ lives should be reduced to a mere societal cost equation. He also said that, “When America grows up, it will look a lot more like Europe,” and cited a conversation with Dr. Phil Gingrey as an example of the congressman’s over-valuing human life. Read more »

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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