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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The state of Oregon and the Obama administration just announced the approval of a federal waiver to allow innovation in the state’s Medicaid program. The feds agreed to chip in $1.9 billion over five years to get the program off the ground. The AP reporter covering this story wrote, “Gov. John...
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The PCMH pushers love to talk about care coordination. They believe the key to more cost-effective care is to have primary care practices hire care coordinators to keep track of patients. I asked the leader of a large integrated network what his care coordinators actually do. He said they mostly track...
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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 talked about patient satisfaction last week, but I thought I’d extend the theme one more week. A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine analyzed data from the National Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. This is where AHRQ (a federal agency) interviews a representative sample of Americans periodically to keep track...
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I’ve just come back from my semi-annual renewal in my belief that family medicine is the foundational solution to make healthcare more affordable in America: the interim session of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians. The most important activity at these meetings is the networking: the chance to bounce ideas and...
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On a health watch website a reporter wrote a story about a national survey of orthopedists and their malpractice concerns. To no one’s surprise, the orthopods said they order tests to protect themselves from being sued later, a practice known as defensive medicine. 96% of the respondents said they ordered scans,...
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A study in Archives of Internal Medicine surveyed a national sample of internists and family physicians about cost issues in medicine. Over 600 responded. 42% felt that most patients in their own practices receive too much care, only 6% said too little. When asked why some patients received too much care,...
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Now that the “supercommittee” of Congress has failed to reach a compromise to restore some fiscal sanity to our national debt, let us consider for a moment what a monumental failure of leadership this waste of time turned out to be. For starters, their task was to reduce the federal deficit...
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