If all goes well (and with your permission), in 2011 Proteus Biomedical will be emailing reports on prescription drug performance and compliance from your stomach directly to your doctor. It works like this: patient swallows a pill with both medicine and a tiny sensor chip (where stomach acid acts as a battery for the chip), chip transmits to a skin patch, the skin patch to a cell phone, and the cell phone to your doctor. Learn More →

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 →

In this season of the Great Arizona Budget Crisis, a new SLHI report estimates that Arizona could raise anywhere from $155 million to upwards of $1 billion annually from some type of "unhealthy" food tax, depending on the amount of the tax and whether it's limited to taxing sugar-sweetened beverages or includes a tax on fattening foods as defined on a "less healthy" nutrition scale. Learn More →

Consider this: The iconic American family – married couple with children – will account for just 22% of households in 2010. The most prevalent type of household is a married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households. With families taking their children to pediatricians, and seniors increasingly seeking out specialists, what is the future patient base for the family practice physician? Learn More →

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 →