September 19th, 2011 by Stanley Feld, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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As we get closer to January 2012, the originally scheduled implementation date for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), the time has come to reexamine the showpiece of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010.
The final rules for ACO’s are now scheduled for release on January 2012. The implementation was originally scheduled for January 2012. As the original rules are being studied and interpreted the program for ACOs implementation became more confusing. Dr. Don Berwick (CMS Director) has refused to discuss the final rules until they have been published in the Federal Register.
“The ACO program is based on the hubristic assumption that the federal government can design the best organizational structure for the delivery of care, foster its development, and control its operation for the entire country.
The federal government has big-footed health system reform. Although there is no one right way to organize care, the federal government (Dr. Don Berwick and President Obama) thinks it has found one—and exerts top-down, bureaucratic control through PPACA to implement it.”
ACOs are supposed to be organizations that improve coordinated care. If an ACO decreases the cost of care Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*
May 18th, 2011 by Shadowfax in Health Policy, Opinion
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I shouldn’t do this. It’s madness to try to delve into the minds of conspiracy theorists and try to make sense of their ravings. But I can’t help myself; I’m drawn like a moth to the flame. It never ends well. I only wind up with a horde of trolls in the comments telling me that I’m a glib supercilious idiot and should stick to medicine or go die in a fire or something.
Sometimes it’s too hard to stay away. Maybe it was the personal affront I felt in the false imputation of ill motives onto progressives. Maybe it was the gross errors in fact, sitting there ripe for the plucking. I don’t know, but I just can’t resist a rebuttal to Dr Rich at Covert Rationing, who weaves a technocratic cost control body into a paranoid web of fantasy, concluding that:
Progressives are dedicated to “progressing” to a perfect society, and they know just how to achieve it. … Specifically, the Progressive program requires individuals to subsume their own individual interests to the overriding interests of the collective – and human nature just doesn’t function that way. Thus, the Progressive program inevitably relies on a cadre of elites – those who have dedicated themselves to furthering the Progressive program – to set things up the right way for the rest of us, while manipulating we in the teeming masses to let them. And the rest of us, once the correct programs and systems are in place, will at last understand that it was all for our own good.
I suppose this paragraph tells you everything you need to know … about Dr Rich. Any supposition that he was approaching the view of policy with a fair mind or that he is willing to attribute anything but the worst motivations to those on the other side of the aisle is completely shredded by this paragraph. As rhetoric goes, it’s up there with “Conservatives want old people to die in pain.” So we can scratch Dr Rich off the list of people who are willing to discuss health care policy with a neutral mindset. He’s engaged in a holy war of ideology. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
January 23rd, 2011 by admin in Opinion, True Stories
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This is a guest post by Dr. John Schumann.
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In 2011, the first wave of baby boomers will turn 65 years old. Sixty-five still has currency because that’s the age at which non-disabled Americans are eligible to be covered under the Medicare program (now itself having reached middle age).
As our economy continues to recover (hopefully) from the Great Recession, the entrance of millions of Americans to the Medicare rolls over the next decade and a half will be a formidable planning challenge. Look at this chart to see how the baby boomers population has surged:
So is the promise of healthcare reform (the “PPACA“), which will enlarge Medicaid by an additional 16 million Americans — about half of the projected growth in coverage for those currently uninsured.
A couple of recent patient encounters got me thinking about these phenomena, and how we are very much in historically uncharted territory. Never have we had so many living so well for so long. We have an entire generation of people reaching “seniority” who will continue to want the most out of life, without many guideposts on how to achieve it. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
January 11th, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Tips
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As part of the new healthcare legislation (Affordable Care Act), the FDA has now published its guidelines for restaurants to inform consumers of the calorie counts of food. It establishes requirements for nutrition labeling of standard menu items for chain restaurants and chain vending machine operators.
This is important because Americans now consume an estimated one-third of their total calories from foods prepared outside the home. Consumers are generally unaware of the number of calories they consume from these foods, and being overweight or obese increases the risk of a number of diseases including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and cancer.
Here’s what the guidelines say:
— Restaurants with 20 or more locations must disclose the number of calories in each standard menu item on menus and menu boards (have 19 chain locations? You get a pass. Daily specials also get a pass.)
— Additional written nutrition information must be available to consumers upon request (total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium sugars, carbs, fiber, protein, etc.)
— The menu must say that the additional nutritional information is available. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
December 13th, 2010 by BobDoherty in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion
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One of the canards slung at the Affordable Care Act is that it creates “death panels” that would allow the government to deny patients lifesaving treatments, even though two independent and non-partisan fact-checking organizations found it would do no such thing.
I don’t bring this up now to rehash the debate, but because the New York Times had a recent story on Arizona’s decision to deny certain transplants to Medicaid enrollees — “death by budget cuts” in the words of reporter Marc Lacey. His story profiles several patients who died when they were unable to raise money on their own to fund a transplant. Lacey quotes a physician expert on transplants who flatly states: “There’s no doubt that people aren’t going to make it because of this decision.”
Arizona Medicaid officials told the Times that they “recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The ACP Advocate Blog by Bob Doherty*
