Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Health Insurance For Me But Not for Thee? - How Legislators Tried to Rig the Repeal of the ACA to Keep Their Own Health Insurance Affordable

The turmoil swirling around the new Trump administration has flushed into the open some things that the public heretofore was probably not meant to see....

We have been writing a lot lately about how the insiders who run large health care organizations, and benefit mightily therefrom, try very hard to control the health care policy discourse, and keep us distracted from their wizardry behind the

Monday, April 17, 2017

Pontifications About Health Care Reform Written by Insiders Who Benefit from the Status Quo - Worse Than We Think

Perceptions that the US health care system is dysfunctional and needs major reform go way back. A timeline from the Tampa Bay Times noted President Theodore Roosevelt's proposal for a national health service in 1912. Nonetheless, as we have discussed endlessly, most attempts at reform failed, and health care dysfunction seems to be getting worse.

One big problem may be that we don't understand

Monday, April 10, 2017

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Medication errors in hospitals don�t disappear with new technology". Government: "It's the doctors' fault." I am cited.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article on EHR problems yesterday entitled "Medication errors in hospitals don�t disappear with new technology." It is based on a recent study by the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, retrievable here: http://patientsafetyauthority.org/ADVISORIES/AdvisoryLibrary/2017/Mar;14(1)/Pages/01.aspx

I am cited. Also cited is an HHS official, Dr. Andrew

Friday, April 7, 2017

"A Radical Idea for Health-Care Reform: Listen to the Doctors" - Oops, I Mean Listen to the Corporate Executives, Directors, and Lobbyists

It has been the season for health care reform in the US since at least the Nixon administration. We have endlessly discussed the unholy triad of health care dysfunction: rising costs, declining access, and stagnant quality.

These days, with all the furor over whether Obamacare should be repealed and replaced, let alone, or improved, it is still the season for health care reform. Last week an

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Part of the Solution, or Part of the Problem? - Health Care Corporate CEOs on Physician Burnout

Physician burnout is in the news again. Late in 2015, an article by Shaneyfelt and colleagues in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings showed an increase in the proportion of physicians reporting at least one symptom of burnout to 54.4% in 2014(1), up from the 45.5% they reported in 2012(2). A March 28, 2017, post in the Health Affairs blog based on the latest article warning about burnout and suggesting

Making the Revolving Door Great Again: Recent FDA Commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb Joins the Pfizer Board of Directors

It has been less than six weeks since our last post on the revolving door. That post emphasized cases of the outgoing revolving door, that ...