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11/19 2009
NCQA Gives Poor Grades to AZ Health Plans
US News’ latest issue has a ranked list of the top ten health plans in the nation. No surprise that none of Arizona’s plans made the list of top ten commercial plans. You have to reach #128 before HealthNet comes up. More enlightening was that our plans didn’t make it into the top 50 for [...] Learn More →
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10/26 2009
One Third of All Health Care Spending is Wasted
Veteran health care reporter Maggie Fox reports today on a Reuters study that confirms what President Obama has been saying all along, and what a 60 Minutes segment told us last night: money is leaking out of our health care system — one third of all health care expenditures are wasted. And 22% of the [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
The Wallet Biopsy
At SLHI’s The ‘R’ Word conference on September 25, the renowned health bioethicist, Art Caplan, noted that the first operation U.S. health care providers increasingly perform is a “wallet biopsy” to determine if the patient has the ability to pay for care or is adequately covered by insurance. Exactly so. Even with the promise of [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
Goodbye, Hello
“Primary care is on death row.” - David Reuben, American Journal of Medicine, 2007 Is it? We put that question and others on the future of primary care to over 75 Arizona clinicians, consumers and others involved in primary care as part of our research for Goodbye, Hello: Framing The Future of Primary Care, due [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
Passing the Medicaid Buck
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer sent a strongly worded letter to Senator Max Baucus protesting a proposed “unfunded mandate” to increase Medicaid eligibility during a time when the state is reeling under the worst financial crisis in its history and is forced to make massive cuts to critical health, education and safety programs. In contrast to [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
The Arizona We Want
Speaking of Arizona’s legislative leaders, only 10 percent of citizens believe that elected officials represent their interests, and only 10 percent rate their performance as “very good.” That’s from a recent Gallup Poll undertaken by the Center for Arizona’s Future as part of its The Arizona We Want initiative to develop a vision and goals [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
Innovation and Health Care Reform
Most innovation in health care occurs at the high end: better – and more expensive – drugs, technology, procedures and medical settings driven by the promise of higher revenues and profits. It’s a money pipeline. Consumers usually don’t pay the bill themselves, public and private payers are accustomed to paying for procedures deemed necessary and [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
If You Think Health Care Reform is Expensive
Consider how expensive it would be without it. The Urban Institute’s recent report, The Cost of Failure to Enact Health Reform, provides a state-by-state estimate of Medicaid costs, rates of employer-sponsored insurance, family/employer premium spending, uncompensated care and the uninsured for three different economic scenarios (worst, intermediate, best) between 2009-2019 if no reform measures are [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
State Health Scorecards
On health system performance were recently released by the Commonwealth Fund. Overall, Arizona ranked 36th, down from 33rd in the 2007 scorecard. Not surprisingly, Arizona performs poorly in equity (39) and prevention and treatment (47), and better in healthy lives (21) and avoidable hospital use and costs (18). According to this analysis, if Arizona improved [...] Learn More →
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10/13 2009
Health is Contextual
It is influenced by our social networks of relationships, our friends and family, and the cues we pick up from a shared culture. Research from the decades-long Framingham study is uncovering surprising relationships between a person’s level of weight and the weight of friends: If a male in the Framingham study had a male friend [...] Learn More →
