Greedy Insurance Company Backs Down: The Little Guy Wins!
A few months back, while we were on vacation in Washington, D.C., my 17-year-old son Noah sustained an injury at 1:00 a.m. I was asleep, but this is usually a few…
Partners Health Care acquiring Neighborhood Health Plan: The 800-Pound Gorilla and the Fig Leaf?
Partners Health Care (the dominant provider network in Greater Boston) and Neighborhood Health Plan (a local mostly-Medicaid HMO) just announced that the former intends to acquire the latter, and maintain…
Ethicist’s Take on Concierge Medicine is a Misdiagnosis
Arthur Caplan, a leading bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a Medscape video editorial on August 4th discussing the ethics of concierge medicine. Titled “Concierge Practice: Unjust for Patients…
End-Use Verification: Simple but Potentially Powerful
When budget cuts loom and all the issues are big and thorny, one is naturally attracted to the small and overlooked initiatives that might make a difference. I recently discovered…
How Much do Financial Incentives Matter to Physicians?
In this experiment, medical students were paid under fee-for-service and capitated payment to treat hypothetical patients. Here is Austin Frakt on the study: In this experiment, medical students were paid…
Emergency Department Charges
Have you been to the emergency room lately? Everyone tries to avoid ERs. For one thing they are meant for emergencies, and despite that fact there are many who…
“Hot Chemotherapy” Gaining Steam
You heard about it first on Patient Power when, a couple of years ago, we interviewed Dr. Andrew Lowy, oncology surgeon at UC San Diego Medical Center. You heard about…
Giving Interns More Sleep is Not Making Hospitals Safer
The Latest: Last month something extraordinary happened at teaching hospitals around the country: Young interns worked for 16 hours straight — and then they went home to sleep. After decades…
Do Teens Really Prefer Phone Calls?
From all I’ve seen and heard, text messaging and Facebook are a lot more effective ways to communicate with today’s teenagers compared to calling landlines and cellphones. So I was…
Rejoinder to yesterday’s Medicare post
Yesterday I posted about a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis and today he’s responded to my post (see Pushback on…
