March 10th, 2010 by StaceyButterfield in Better Health Network, Health Policy
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This week I’m attending the co-located National Medical Home Summit, National Retail Clinic Summit, and Population Health and Disease Management Colloquium here in Philly. (If only they had invited the transitions of care folks, they could have covered every hot-button issue in medical practice.)
The opening lecture, by Health Affairs editor Susan Dentzer, was meant to be an overview of health system change, but not surprisingly, the focus was on one obvious potential source of change–pending health care reform legislation. She saw the major accomplishment of last week’s summit as convincing the “three or four people who might have believed in a bipartisan solution” that it wasn’t going to happen. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
March 7th, 2010 by DrRob in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Humor
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Chaos theory – Noun – The branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behavior is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.
Alternative definition:
Chaos theory – Noun – The branch of healthcare that deals with making the payment system increasingly complex and ever changing. This complexity and confusion impact physicians and patients in such a way that appropriate services in care of the patient are subject to rules and regulations that are deliberately complex, making alterations from the momentary rules inevitable. This exists so that even small alterations will free the insurance company from the responsibility to pay for said service.
I am no physicist, but I honestly think that a grasp and understanding of the first type of Chaos theory is more likely than that of the second. Let me give a demonstration of the second chaos theory in action: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*
March 5th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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DrRich is pleased to note that events have so quickly confirmed the explanation he gave, in his last post, regarding what the health insurance companies are up to by choosing to massively increase insurance premiums at this critical juncture. The insurance companies, to repeat, are willfully embracing their assigned role as “villain,” in order to get apparently stalled healthcare reforms back on track.
A mere few hours after DrRich had posted, Kathleen Sibelius issued a press release angrily documenting several additional requests for large rate increases by health insurance companies all across the land, and pointedly reminding us regular folks that healthcare reform would prevent these greedy companies from committing such abusive and harmful acts. And thus has the administration now officially established runaway health insurance premiums as the crisis of the moment. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
March 3rd, 2010 by EvanFalchukJD in Better Health Network, Health Policy
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Barely a week after Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said he wants state controls on the price of health insurance, President Obama apparently wants to do the same at the federal level. Both men must believe it’s good politics, because there are about 4,000 years of evidence that it’s not good policy.
But the trouble for reformers has never really been about policy. It’s been about a fundamental misunderstanding of how people view health care and the very bad things that happen when you give people the impression you’re going to mess with what they have.
In this sense, the reform bills are like perpetual anxiety machines. Contraptions that continually produce more public anxiety than they consume.
But why is this?
Well one of the surest ways to create anxiety in someone is to make them feel uncertain about something important to them. It’s one reason why companies suffer from problems with morale in tough economic times. If a company doesn’t level with its employees about what’s happening, smart employees start to assume it must be because the news is bad. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the management come out and explain that everything is ok? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*
February 28th, 2010 by Richard Cooper, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
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An important article appeared in the NYT recently, describing a new paper by Peter Bach, which is in today’s NEJM. Peter’s paper (“A Map to Bad Policy“) debunks the Dartmouth Atlas and cautions against its use. As I said in the Wash Post in September, the Dartmouth Atlas is the ”Wrong Map for Health Care Reform.”
More damning even than Peter’s analysis was Elliott Fisher’s reply: “Dr. Fisher agreed that the current Atlas measures should not be used to set hospital payment rates, and that looking at the care of patients at the end of life provides only limited insight into the quality of care provided to those patients. He said he and his colleagues should not be held responsible for the misinterpretation of their data.” Really? It was someone else’s interpretation? OK, Elliott, you’re not responsible. Just stand in the corner. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at PHYSICIANS and HEALTH CARE REFORM Commentaries and Controversies*
