Does Obamacare Limit Profits for Health Insurance Companies in Your State?

By Jason Shafrin One of the provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a ACA, a.k.a. Health Reform, a.k.a. Obamacare) is that it limits the profits of health insurance companies. The ACA imposes a minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) on all insurers. The MLR is the amount of money spent on covered person [...]

Do Something Really Innovative In health: Crowdsource Problems, Not (Just) Solutions

By David Shaywitz Businesses exist to solve problems, right?  Certainly, this is the heart of the classic entrepreneurial model: you become obsessed with a particular problem, and create a business to solve it.  Example: eBay was created by Pierre Omidyar to solve a perceived problem with inefficient markets, and since its inception has generally focused on [...]

Nimble Medicine

By Dave Chase In a piece for the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, early in the 1900s, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed roughly half the workforce. Beginning in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. After many [...]

Genetic Testing and Insurance: One Datum

By DAVID FRIEDMAN Reductions in the cost of genetic testing and improvements in what we know about what it tells us produce obvious benefits; if you know you are  likely to have some particular medical problem, you may be able to take precautions against it. But they also have at least one potential downside. The [...]

Thinking About the Bipartisan Policy Center Report on Health IT

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn There are few issue areas within the Beltway of Washington, DC, that have enjoyed more support across the political aisle than health care information technology. In 2004, George Bush asserted that every American would/should have an electronic medical record by 2014. Since then, Democrats and Republicans alike have supported the broad concept [...]

Care Innovations Summit

By Kent Bottles, MD Anyone who is concerned about the future transformation of the United States clinical delivery system should pay attention to the Care Innovations Summit. The selection of presentations as well as the content that was discussed says volumes about where CMS believes payment is headed. Speaker after speaker stated that decreasing the [...]

It Takes a CEO to Save the U.S. Health-Care System

By Darrell Moon Forget Washington and the political debate over Obamacare. The real battle for the future of health care is being fought in the world of business, where tens of thousands of companies have seen their financial well-being undermined by skyrocketing employee health costs. Although few people realize it, employee health costs have now [...]

The Republican Myth of Obama’s Entitlement Society

By ROBERT REICH One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.” In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an [...]

The Latest Big Pharma Scandal

By Shannon Brownlee Imagine yourself in front of your computer, looking up information about a drug prescribed by your doctor. Your Internet search tells you that there is a cheaper, maybe even a generic version available, but you have just paid top dollar for the brand name drug. You also learn that another treatment may [...]

Congressional Research Service: Courts Could Force HHS to Implement CLASS Act, Despite Its Insolvency

By Avik Roy Today, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 1173, the Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act of 2011, sponsored by Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.). This two-page bill would repeal the fiscal disaster known as the CLASS Act, Obamacare’s new long-term care entitlement, which was “suspended” by the Obama Administration [...]