by Merrill Goozner GoozNews Government prognosticators once again foresee rising health care costs amid falling insurance coverage. Is this an election prediction? Each mid-year, economists and actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services offer their predictions for the direction of health care spending over the next decade. This year they projected health care’s share of […]

by Merrill Goozner GoozNews Hospitals are pushing back on an experiment that would put providers on budgets. CMS should ignore their lobbyists and consultants playing games with numbers. Changing the way hospitals and doctors get paid is central to reforming our dysfunctional health care system. Payment reform can achieve better health outcomes, improve the patient […]

by Merrill Goozner GoozNews How high-deductible health insurance plans, touted by free marketeers, caused the medical debt crisis and degraded public health. ~~~~~~~~ The 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, best known for its senior citizen drug plans, also encouraged the rapid expansion of high-deductible health plans (HDHPs). It allowed people, mostly well-off, to put pre-tax earnings […]

A comprehensive All-Payer Claims Databases would help the health care system become more effective and efficient. The Department of Labor could do something about that, but hasn’t. Merrill at GoozNews is depicting why providers and software vendors closely guard patient information, maintaining exclusivity so as patients have to rely on them. Insurance companies follow suit […]

Good commentary by Merrill Goozner. I subscribe to his site. He, I and others have gotten together and talked. Today? Merrill calls attention to the Lown Institute which publishes a list of the top ten baddies of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare. Martin Shkreli made number one for 2023. I did ask if I can […]

This is the upper end or the delivery of product and care of the healthcare food chain. If you want to improve healthcare delivery pricing, you might want to go down a couple of levels more also. The costs of pharma and healthcare supplies are areas to investigate. It may have a bit more of […]

I had read the JAMA Network version of this report although I could not get into the Full Text version. You can find a more open version by using a New in Private Window. Cliff notes . . . the polluting company paid for moving the people. In which, the health of the people, the […]

And undermine public health in the process I ran across Merrill and his words at the Washington Monthly magazine. He is another person writing on Healthcare and its issues. This particular article is on the mark in terms of what is occurring in pharmaceutical healthcare today. Kip, Merrill, and I are all hitting similar notes […]

This is another extension of what happens when private equity gets involved in business. Hospitals are more important as it has an impact on the neighborhoods around them. If one dies, the local neighborhood is stranded. Good article on just that topic. Private Equity and Its Hospitals, Washington Monthly, Merrill Goozner “Safety net hospitals” serve […]