by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Carrot and Stick The Obama administration has issued regulations allowing employers to use both incentives and penalties in wellness programs. There is some controversy here, such as: employer plans setting and enforcing blood pressure and cholesterol standards punishing smokers (less controversial perhaps) – is this punishing addicts? there […]

Over at “Economists View,” Anne and Muses are having a discussion over why some 30-something million will be uninsured under the PPACA Paul Krugman: The Obamacare Shock. The conversation goes back and forth citing references without giving any real explanation of what the 31 million is composed of and why they will not be covered. […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: I really shouldn’t write this….. This will, if Dan publishes the piece, offend someone for certain. I have a libertarian do-your-own-thing streak, but something recently really struck me as a tragic image. So I am in the grocery store, and coming around the aisle hear the beep-beep […]

Compare: When people realize that their most personal, sensitive, intimate, private health-care information is in the hands of the IRS that’s been willing to use people’s tax information against political opponents of this administration, then people have pause and they pull back in horror. — Michele Bachmann, on ABC News/Yahoo, May 20 (H/T Glenn Kessler, […]

“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, [Michele Bachmann] asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ” — Bob Unruh, Why Obama Released Embarrassing IRS Bombshell, WND Exclusive, May […]

“All nine of S&P Healthcare Economic Indices showed slower annual growth rates for February 2013 compared to January 2013. As measured by the S&P Healthcare Economic Commercial Index, healthcare costs covered by commercial insurance plans rose by 4.62% in February, down from +5.41% reported for January. Annual growth rates in Medicare claim costs increased by […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt    from a commentary I am writing…… Health Care Thoughts: Welcome to The Matrix Big Data, Data Mining, Data Analytics Health care providers create and store massive amounts of data generated by clinical and business functions. This hot new term for this mass of data is “big data.” Until recently, the […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: This is a little strange California’s health care exchange is often cited as being as the forefront of complying with the letter and spirit of Obamacare. So it seems a little strange that California has exempted most exchange information from the public records laws, including information about […]

Well, we AB types–readers and writers, alike–are familiar with John Maynard Keynes’s famous line that “In the long run, we are all dead.”  By which he either meant that economists, if they are to be useful, must try to predict and recommend short-term government policies that avoid or help end current, severe economic downturns, rather than […]

There are quite a few blogs in the blogosphere who tend to get the PPACA wrong and conflate the issues of it well beyond what is reasonable and truthful. Maybe they just do not know what the facts are and miss the benefits of the PPACA to dwell on the negatives exclusively.  Many  tend to […]