I’m subscribed to a service that sends out daily emails about philanthropic funding in healthcare. It’s full of regional and national foundations who, with the best of intentions, are trying to make our healthcare system better. Most of the funding falls under two categories: 1) infrastructure building such as new wings...
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I’ve seen a few commentaries that suggest healthcare inflation is slowing. There are different opinions about the root causes – merely a consequence of the general economic slowdown vs. a true change in utilization patterns. Two recent reports suggest that costs healthcare inflation is not really slowing and is still greater...
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Last week I wrote about the comparison between the average hospital costs of U.S. hospitals compared to other developed countries. The bottom line is that U.S. hospital average length of stay and total hospital days per adult per year compare very favorably to the rest of the world. But the cost...
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Since I started the blog American Healthscare, I’ve written nearly 80 posts trying to raise awareness about how inefficient and expensive our healthcare system is, how this reality harms the rest of our economy, which ironically leads to worse health. This is on top of the four years I spent writing...
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I’m being a little facetious with this back-of-the-envelope calculation, but not much. In several of the PCMH demonstration projects, other providers of primary care services such as WeCare, the historical record of the Starfield work, and the experience of QuadMed primary care shows that just having a typical American population shift...
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The PPACA (The Obama Healthcare Law) includes a provision that employers may use up to 30% of the employee’s health insurance premium for wellness incentives. An article in the NEJM discussed some of the difficulties of this seemingly straightforward effort to prevent the onset of chronic diseases and lower healthcare costs....
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One of the approaches some corporations are taking to hold down health care costs is to put more responsibility on their employees through high-deductible health insurance plans. It makes sense that they would try this. After all, this reflects the daily life of the business community as they compete for consumers...
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