by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Book Review There has been a lot of buzz about a book published on September 18th. (Dan here..See here for one buzz) UNACCOUNTABLE: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care by Marty Makary, MD This is an important book because in plain English […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: PPACA Penalty/Tax The Congressional Budget Office predicts in 2016 up to 6 million largely middle income workers will pay the PPACA “tax” or “penalty” or whatever we decide to call it, averaging about $1200. This is about 50% higher than previous estimates of impacted taxpayers. A weak economy […]
by Tom aka Rusty RustbeltHealth Care Thoughts: Physician BurnoutDuring the years I worked every day with physicians I learned a great deal, including about the time pressure, the relentless work flow and the sleep deprivation during physicians’ “on call” days.A Mayo Clinic (http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1351351) has been published and 50% of physicians are feeling impacts of burnout. […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Hospitals RisingOne of the key operational themes of PPACA (Obamacare) is integration. Almost all models of integration have a hospitals or hospital networks as the hub. Some networks are already highly integrated, others are headed in that direction. (There was a big push for integration at the […]
by Tom aka Rusty RustbeltHealth Care Thoughts: Breast Cancer Battle Evidence-based medicine may not be as easy as it first sounds. An opinion piece in the British Medical Journal (http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e5132) attacks the Susan G. Komen Foundation for over-hyping the value of mammography. This is not a new controversy, and experts have lined up on both sides of […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Cardiologists Gone Wild I have been waiting……. for a major federal investigation into unnecessary cardiology interventions. According to the NYT a major target are some HCA hospitals in Florida. The NYT focuses on HCA and for-profit, but I think this is a much broader problem. Unlike some […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Update 7/26: The Deloitte link is working: http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Insights/centers/center-for-health-solutions/21c1f310fb8b8310VgnVCM3000001c56f00aRCRD.htm. Health Care Thoughts: The Deloitte Survey The annual employers survey by Deloitte (Big Four CPAs) has caused some buzz among us talking heads, although sadly drowned out by the tragedy in Colorado. (As of this moment the download link is broken, apparently […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Employer Responses The Urban Institute and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation published a paper (October 2011) about the potential responses of employers and employees. The paper tends to take an optimistic view on the responses of employers, although warning of possible short term thinking by some employers. Now the […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health care thoughts: Bundling Medical Payments The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is chocked full of pilot programs, mandates, guarantees, prohibitions, penalties, taxes and experiments. One of those experiments may define the future of Medicare funding for surgeons, and then may define the future of most of the […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Crazy like Foxes? Several governors are announcing they will not begin building the state health exchanges required by PPACA (Obamacare). Some of this is pure partisan, and some a stall until November. Failure to comply will result in the feds installing exchanges in those states. The states […]