Posted in Insurance
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04/14 2011
Low Health Literacy
Is a major impediment to both good health and lower health costs. A recent report pegs the cost of low health literacy to the U.S. economy in the range of $108B to $238B annually. This represents between seven and 17 percent of all personal healthcare expenditures. Some 36 percent of the U.S. adult population has [...] Learn More →
Posted in Insurance
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02/12 2010
The Single Greatest Threat
The single greatest threat to U.S. budget stability is federal healthcare spending, according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Reality, some say, is a consensual hallucination. Certainly the linear projection of our health system status quo, with infinite desires meeting finite resources, fits that definition. Learn More →
Posted in Insurance
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02/12 2010
Cost Shifting on Steroids
The Governor's budget proposal to eliminate Kidscare and save the state about $23 million by disenrolling almost 44,000 children. If you think hospitals, community clinics, nonprofit agencies and other providers of health and human services are at the edge now, just wait. It’s cost shifting on steroids. It’s unfair, ineffective and inefficient – and that’s just for starters. But the Governor is right about one thing. Learn More →
Posted in EHR
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11/6 2009
Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference Features Health Care Innovators
I’ve been a bit less active on the reform front this week because I’m preparing for next week’s Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference,, which will of course have a large part of the program — a keynote and a panel — devoted to health care and the entrepreneurial responses to the broken system. I produce that conference [...] Learn More →
Posted in Healthcare reform
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10/23 2009
Living with Leukemia
A friend of mine, happily a really good writer, is living with chronic leukemia. Today, it’s a treatable disease, but only for the rich or the poor. If you are poor and are on ACCCHS (Arizona’s Medicaid) Gleevec, the miracle drug that has converted leukemia from a death sentence to a chronic condition, can be [...] Learn More →
Posted in Insurance
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10/19 2009
Will Arizona Lose KidsCare to Balance the Budget?
The Governor’s Office has asked Arizona state agencies to submit a budget with 15% further cuts for the next fiscal year to help the State balance the budget. They are all posted on the web, so I took a look at the cuts proposed by AHCCCS, after the DPS went to the media with a [...] Learn More →
Posted in Healthcare reform
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10/15 2009
Pat Elliott Talks Further About Her Experience with Health Insurance, Cancer
What you really want to know, and are too polite to ask, is how sick am I and what’s ahead? Yesterday I got some answers and am happy to share them with you. I’ve been on Gleevec for one month, and yesterday’s test results show that it’s WORKING. It wasn’t a given that it would, [...] Learn More →
Posted in EHR
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10/7 2009
Health 2.0 Empowers Patients and Providers
Image via CrunchBase I love to attend Health 2.0 and listen to the parade of innovative solutions being developed by entrepreneurs who see the gigantic problems in the health care system and are trying to solve them. Until recently, adoption by the major players in the industry was slow to non-existent, but this year I [...] Learn More →
Posted in Healthcare reform
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09/25 2009
Arthur Caplan Tells it Like (He Thinks) It is
I was fortunate enough to attend SLHI’s “The R Word event” today, at which Dr.Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics, Univ of Pa and arguably one of the ten most influential people in science, raised the questions President Obama has asked us not to mention: At what time do you put a price [...] Learn More →
Posted in Healthcare reform
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09/2 2009
Rationing May be Better for You Than Care
If you missed the latest episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal, during which he showed a film based on Maggie Mahar’s excellent book “Money Driven Medicine,” here are a few things to chew on before the rationing discussion you are all invited to on September 25. Over the last 12 years the number of people visiting [...] Learn More →
