I’ve been remiss in addressing a particularly thoughtful response to my earlier post on 23andMe’s price-cutting and its potential consequences for the future of personal genomics. So let me remedy that. To recap briefly: 23andMe, the spit-to-read-your-genome company, dropped its subscription price to $399 from $999, a level that seemed to turn its service into a loss leader for what...
Health Care Industry Archive
September 2008
Unbeknownst to most folks outside of lobbyists and healthcare-IT types, a significant showdown is looming over a federal mandate that would require health-insurance companies and hospitals to adopt a new set of billing codes by 2011. The new codes, known as ICD-10, would replace an outdated set known, aptly enough, as ICD-9. (ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases, and is...
More health-insurance plans paying for overseas care — Medical tourism, or sending patients to cheaper overseas hospitals, appears to be the latest new tool for health-insurance companies and employers seeking to cut costs. Among the most recent developments: Blue Cross & Blue Shield of South Carolina created a medical-tourism subsidiary that maintains an international network of...
Preventing avoidable medical errors — which most likely still account for close to 100,000 deaths a year in U.S. hospitals — remains one of the most important quality-control efforts underway in healthcare. It’s a huge challenge, though, largely because most errors result from the actions and inattention of thousands of loosely coordinated doctors, nurses and hospital...
Cardinal Health to spin off clinical, medical-product units — The healthcare-services company said it will form a new $4 billion spinoff firm from units that handle distribution of surgical and medical products. Cardinal will retain drug and medical-supply chain services under its own roof. [Source: Health Data Management] HPA files for bankruptcy protection — Hospital Partners of...
Via the Health Care Blog, I learned that the folks at Good magazine recently put together a very handy one-stop diagram that outlines most everything you’d need to know about why the U.S. healthcare system is such a mess. Click on the image for a larger version:
Among those fervently hoping that Washington can soon reach agreement on a financial-bailout package have to be large health-insurance companies. Late last week, Aetna became the latest health-insurance giant to disclose that it also has a substantial exposure to securities offered by the failed investment bank Lehman Brothers and the recently bailed-out insurance giant American International...
Health-insurance companies have gotten kicked around pretty good for the seemingly common practice of “rescission” — essentially the post-hoc cancellation of individual insurance policies, often enough after a health-plan member falls ill and begins to rack up some serious medical bills. In a recent California scandal, for instance, health plans Kaiser Permanente, Health Net,...
Thanks largely to some classic muckraking by the WSJ, it’s now fairly common knowledge that many nonprofit hospitals have indulged themselves by building big, expensive facilities designed to attract well-insured or wealthy patients, gouging less fortunate individuals with huge up-front payment demands for expensive treatment, and sometimes even by building effective local monopolies that...
Of the many problems that health-insurance companies face these days, the fact that their members frequently fear and loathe them probably ranks as one of the biggest. Of course, health plans such as UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint bear a significant amount of the blame for this state of affairs. Not only do many people remember their heavy-handed attempts at cost-control in the 1990s, the...
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BNET Healthcare provides daily industry trends and news coverage with insights for managers and executives, focusing on major health care providers, hospitals and facilities, insurance companies, and medical device manufacturers. In addition to detailed company profiles, you will find detailed industry analysis on new alliances and partnerships, healthcare products, medical patents, health care cost control, lawsuits, management and board changes, and all other important business issues.