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Massachusetts: A Foreshadow For Healthcare Reform?

Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, suggests we watch Massachusetts for what might be coming with healthcare reform:

Things are playing out just as one might predict in the Massachusetts small business and individual insurance market. The Insurance Commissioner turned down proposed rate increases, the state’s insurers appealed to the courts, and now they can’t write policies.

Perhaps more concerning is what Dennis Byron, a commenter on Mr. Levy’s blog, says about insurance exchanges:

I care because I am one of those who has been cancelled by my insurer (Fallon), solely, I believe, because I am an individual, have been told to go to the exchange, but the exchange does not work. This is a perfect example of why you don’t want the guys that run the registry running your healthcare.

If nothing else, this exposes the risks inherent to mandating unproven policy initiatives on a national scale that have yet to be even worked out in a single state.

*Sigh*

-WesMusings of a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist.

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

Cookbook Medicine: Using “Treatment Standardization” To Bar Doctors From Hospitals

Is the need for cookbook medicine being used as a ploy to bar cardiologists from practicing at competing hospital systems in Colorado? An excerpt from the Reporter Herald:

Banner Health, the owner of McKee Medical Center in Loveland and the operator of North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, soon will bar cardiologists who are not on the Banner payroll from practicing at the Greeley hospital. The denial of hospital privileges to cardiologists outside the Phoenix-based Banner system is the latest step in carving up the heart of the Northern Colorado health care market, where two dominant hospital groups — Banner and Poudre Valley Health System — vie for shares. Read more »

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

Box-Top Board Certification For Doctors

Remember when you were a child and an offer to be a member of a special spy club appeared on your morning cereal box? You knew — yes, KNEW — that the offer was the real deal. All you had to do is send in 3 cereal box tops and you’d be sent all the prerequisite items. Of course, when the plastic trinkets arrived weeks later, there always seemed to be the air of buzzkill when the reality of what you received for your efforts was revealed.

This could never happen with board certification for doctors, could it?

Yesterday we learned that this year every specialist has to recertify to maintain their status as a board-certified specialist. In the past, this was a voluntary process that doctors participated in to show a jury of their peers that they had the right stuff to practice medicine at the highest level possible. It was a respected term. Doctors generally knew that a board-certified specialist meant something.

Even though doctors pay thousands of dollars to the American Board of Internal Medicine for the opportunity to study for and take the certification exam, once passed doctors were proud to hang that certificate on their wall. In effect, it is the crowning achievement of one’s career.

But what if that certificate on the wall had the value of certificate purchased from a cereal box top spy club? Doctors might be pretty upset, right? Well guess what. Although the majority of those certificates hanging on the wall are the real deal, many are not. Read more »

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

The Timeline Of Healthcare Reform

As the dust settles on the Great Healthcare Reform Bill of 2010 passage in Congress, it’s time to ask what we got for the effort. No matter what people thought of the bill before, like it or not, it’s here.

Still, few people really understand what the bill contains and when the benefits and costs for the measure will be incurred on a year-by-year basis. Given the bill’s complexity and tortuous path though Social Security and IRS tax codes, this really isn’t a surprise, I suppose.

So here’s my simplified broad-brush overview, broken down by year, culled from several sources as referenced. Read more »

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

Nailed In The Heart

…and he lived (video) to talk about it:

The man’s heart was pierced as he was nailing boards with a co-worker at a carpentry shop. The shop’s owner said the men were working together, when suddenly, they ran into each other resulting in the nail gun going off.

Oops.

-WesMusings of a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist.

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

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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