Category: Health Care
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Obama Makes Hospital Charge Masters Public
And the best article on the implications of this, surprisingly, comes from Huffington post authors Young and Kirkham: The database released on Wednesday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lays out for the first time and in voluminous detail how much the vast majority of American hospitals charge for the 100 most…
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There Are Legitimate Criticisms of Obamacare – Hospitals Should not be Penalized for Readmissions
Crazy ranting about impending socialism/fascism aside, there are legitimate critiques to be made of Obamacare. One policy in particular that raises my ire is penalizing hospitals over performance metrics and penalizing readmissions in particular. The way it works is, patients are admitted to the hospital, treated, and eventually discharged, but a indicator of failure of…
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Fixing the Chargemaster Problem for the Uninsured
For those disturbed by the evils of the hospital chargemaster as exposed by Brill’s piece in time, Uwe E. Reinhardt’s proposed solution is a must read. While the hospitals are never going to charge the uninsured the same rate as they charge medicare (and probably be less forgiving the more they think they can get…
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What is the cause of excess costs in health care Part 4 – Time's "Bitter Pill", CEO compensation and the Kafkaesque chargemaster
Steven Brill’s extensive piece in Time has generated a good discussion once again on why Americans pay so much more for health care than other countries, and while I agree with most of his critiques, he seems to have gotten overly hung-up on the hospital chargemaster. Readers of this blog know I’ve also discussed reform…
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Mitt Romney is the wrong choice for healthcare
It seems every day brings a new, glaring falsehood about medical care from Romney, who has bizarrely decided to run against his own healthcare plan in order to appease right wing voters. Now he’s claiming Americans don’t die from lack of healthcare coverage. His reasoning? The unfunded mandate and healthcare-of-last resort stopgap that is EMTALA.…
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AEI writes an honest article about ObamaCare
This article from the Sunday Times by AEI fellow J.D. Kleinke is exceptional for two reasons. For one, it’s an excellent explanation for why conservatives should agree with Obamacare. Second, despite coming from the American Enterprise Institute, an organization that regularly contributes global warming and other conspiratorial nonsense to the WSJ editorial page, it appears…
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Atul Gawande on Resisting Health Care Reform – He Misses a Tactic, Lying!
Atul Gawande, thoughtful as always, writes about the “wicked problem” of healthcare reform and the historical similarity between this battle and previous battles to expand fairness to all of our citizens. Opening with the kind of experiences all physicians have had with tragically-uninsured patients, he emphasizes why this was a needed change: A few days…
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Healthcare Upheld!
It’s good news that the Supreme Court split 5-4 with Roberts (and not Kennedy?!?) as the deciding vote, to uphold the affordable care act. It’s interesting that this was controversial, and certainly Roberts led the court to a very safe middle ground making the issue about taxation and saying the commerce clause could not apply.…
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Three reasons the Supreme Court should uphold ACA
With the Supreme Court hearing arguments for the next three days on the Affordable Care Act, many commentators, including Dahlia Lithwick appear to have so much contempt for the Roberts court that they believe the issue will likely be settled on politics rather than law. The first proposition is that the health care law is…
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What is the cause of excess costs in US healthcare? Take three – signs of reform
We’ve already extensively discussed why it costs twice as much for the US to provide healthcare for it’s citizens all the while failing to cover health care for all. Most recently, we discussed the hidden tax of the uninsured and the perverse incentive structure of US healthcare which encourage costlier care, more utilization, and more…