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Calorie Listings Don’t Seem To Influence Eating Behaviors In Poor Neighborhoods

It may still be a little fuzzy how health care reform will affect insurance coverage, but there is one area where it’s already having a clear impact, according to the Washington Post: menus.

A lesser-known aspect of the proposed legislation is that it will mandate calorie posting of the sort currently done in New York City for restaurants with more than 20 locations nationwide. The WashPo story reports on the positive impacts that publicization of calories has public health–apparently restaurants offer more healthy dishes, and diners swarm to them. Which is interesting, because the last time we discussed this issue, researchers were reporting that people actually consumed more calories after the stats were posted. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Lower Poverty Rates Result In Lower Healthcare Costs

The favorite sound bite of Dartmouth disciples is to compare some high cost locale with a low cost locale. First it was Miami vs. Mayo, then Birmingham vs. Grand Junction, then Los Angeles vs. Green Bay and now it’s Los Angeles vs. Portland. This time, Tom Brokaw delivered the message on Meet the Press: “At UCLA Medical Center, they spend $92,000 on the last two years of a life, but in Portland, Oregon, just north of there (it’s actually 825 miles north of there), they spend $52,000 because they’ve got better controls on Medicare.  So until you begin to pay for value and pay for performance, health care reform is not going to work.”

What do Miami, Birmingham and Los Angeles have in common, and what do Rochester MN (home of Mayo), Grand Junction CO, Green Bay WI and Portland OR have in common. One thing is poverty. The maps below show the density of poverty in each (light green shows census tracks with 20-40% poverty and red shows tracks with >40% poverty). Read more »

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

Geographic Variation & Healthcare Reform

On the heels of the American Hospital Association’s recent demonstration of gross discrepancies in the Dartmouth group’s data, MedPAC released its December 2009 report to Congress showing the same. Confirming data for 2000 (reported in their 2003 report), MedPAC demonstrated much less variation among states and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) than described by Dartmouth for states or hospital referral regions (HRRs). Closer scrutiny of MedPAC’s data reveals even more. Read more »

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

Legislating to Reduce Readmissions – Safety Net Hospitals Will Be Cut First

According to MedPAC, 18% of hospitalizations among Medicare beneficiaries resulted in readmission within 30 days, accounting for $15 billion in spending. Since treatable chronic illnesses are responsible for many such hospitalizations, it is assumed that they represent failures of the health care system. MedPAC claims that 84% of readmissions are potentially preventable. However, as will become evident, most readmissions reflect differences in co-morbidities, poverty and other social determinants, all of which deserve attention, including better transition care, but few of which are under the control of hospitals. Nonetheless, health care reform assumes that regulators can accurately adjust for such risks and estimate the “excess.”

Both the House and Senate bills include reductions in payments to hospitals with “excess” readmissions. Payment would be reduced 20% for “excess” readmissions within seven days and 10% within fifteen days. Hospitals with 30-day risk-adjusted readmission rates above the 75th percentile would incur penalties of 10-20%, scaled to the time to readmission. Read more »

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

Academic Medical Centers and the Poor: Dartmouth Data Revisited

In a recent Health Affairs blog, Wennberg and Brownlee lamented that op-eds, blogs, letters to members of Congress, broadsides in the press and now a report from the American Hospital Association decry the Dartmouth Atlas as a lot of “malarkey.” Once again they tried to defend their work by proving that race and poverty don’t matter, but they do. Even the “impartial” introduction by the editor of Health Affairs, a member of Dartmouth’s Board, couldn’t save the day: “Wennberg and Brownlee rebut claims that variations among academic medical centers are due to differences in patient income, race, and health status.” Wrong, again! That’s exactly what variations are due to. Read more »

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

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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