Hospital advertising is, by and large, a baleful influence on healthcare, not least because it so often bolsters demand for expensive but unproven procedures that inflate medical bills and insurance premiums without any guarantee that they’re making anyone better. Whew. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, let me direct your attention to two great in-depth looks at the hows and...
Health Care Industry Archive
August 2008
I’ve written sympathetically about the efforts of Medicare and private insurers such as WellPoint to eliminate avoidable medical errors — particularly so-called “never events,” such as surgery on the wrong side of the body or operations that leave sponges or instruments inside the patient — by refusing to pay for follow-up care. The plan still seems like a good one...
For a short break from our normal diet of current healthcare challenges and problems, I thought I’d draw your attention to Richard Eskow’s recent post on seven long-term medical and healthcare trends that should be on the radar of anyone concerned about healthcare issues. His post over at The Sentinel Effect is definitely worth reading in its entirety, so I’ll just highlight...
A few days ago I noted Joe Paduda’s argument that hospitals have regained some pricing clout against health insurers, enabling them to pad their bottom line at the expense of health plans. After some further scouting around, I still think the picture isn’t entirely clear. So let’s lay out the data points and take a look. The first, and most extreme, case involves the nonprofit...
The news here is a few weeks old, but I was still struck by the fact that large insurers are apparently starting to crack down on the overuse of medical imaging. According to Bloomberg, companies like WellPoint and Magellan Health Services believe that expensive and unnecessary CT and MRI scans cost them roughly $30 billion a year. These scans cost roughly $2,000 a pop and, at least in the case...
Hand this off to the Bureau of Questionable Ideas: Columbia Pacific, a Seattle investment firm has raised $325 million to bring “U.S.-style healthcare” to nations such as Malaysia, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The fund’s current focus is India, where it hopes to own more than 26 facilities by the end of the decade, up from five right now. Apparently the idea is to import...
The U.S. healthcare system is sometimes best thought of as a three-way tug-of-war between payers (private insurers and the feds), providers (hospitals and doctors) and suppliers (drug and medical-device makers). No, patients don’t really figure into this analogy — at best, they’re trussed up in the middle somewhere. Most big changes in the system result when one of the three...
Times just aren’t getting any better for nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans. Not only has operating income hit the skids, but pressures to merge or convert to for-profit status keep rising. Consider: In mid-August, Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Jersey applied to become a for-profit organization. The 76-year-old health plan, the state’s largest health insurer,...
Since American Medical News was kind enough to compile the data (subscription required), I thought I’d offer up this quick pair of tables on the nation’s largest nonprofit and for-profit health insurers. These accompanied an article about the proposed merger of the Blues plans Highmark and Independence Blue Cross, and so treats them as a single entity. Largest nonprofit health...
Free-market medicine in the form of “consumer-directed healthcare” — typically involving health plans with high deductibles — has been tough for many people to swallow. But insurers aren’t happy with employers that have tried to limit the financial risks for their employers. The basic idea of high-deductible plans, which usually force people to pay several thousand...
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