Post Removed by Author

The Big Birds of Health Care

For the first time in this election campaign Mitt Romney came up with a useful “zinger”. During the first Presidential debate Romney suggested that we should examine our various expenditures and ascertain if the item we spend taxpayers money on is “important enough to borrow money from China”. Unsurprisingly, the first thing that came to Romney’s mind was a public service providing small children with education on racial diversity and basic literacy skills. And although, we are not directly borrowing money from China to pay for things, it wouldn’t hurt to go through our expenses, including the many small and apparently insignificant ones, and see if there’s anything we can do without. It actually may be less painful to make a thousand additive little cuts than to locate one large silver bullet that is certain to cause commensurately large pain. Of course, such exercise would be fraught with controversy, since what may look frivolous to one party, could look worthwhile to another. But ...

Opportunity for HIT Vendors to Do Good

Yesterday, I found an email from Health and Human Services (HHS) in my inbox highlighting a new initiative where the “Obama Administration and Text4Baby join forces to connect pregnant women and children to health coverage and information”. The goal of this partnership is “to promote enrollment in both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)”. Having more babies and children obtain insurance coverage is obviously a worthy endeavor, and if it can be accomplished by simply sending informative text messages to pregnant women, even better. Of course having insurance coverage doesn’t always translate into having access to an actual doctor, particularly for Medicaid enrollees. In an unrelated coincidental turn of events, it just so happened that I have had the recent opportunity to spend time with large numbers of Pediatric practices, most of which were small independent practices in middle-class suburban areas. The main goal of these conversations was to elicit doctors’...

Resist the Fiction of Health Insurance

It has come to pass. President Donald J. Trump. Are you scared? Are you planning to “resist” the policies you imagine President Trump will pursue by tweeting furiously with clever hashtags galore? Would you prefer to move my fastidious quotation marks from “resist” to “President”? This is after all, the first President in a very long time to take office without the blessings and financial support of established “world order” leaders. It must be rather disconcerting to proceed without clear guidance from our betters, especially seeing how well they served us over the last decades, and particularly when it comes to affordability of health care in America. Are you binge-watching the Obamacare drama playing on America’s center stage these days? Are you tweeting and retweeting every shred of information that proves Obamacare is a huge success, and its repeal will mean certain death for millions? Or are you busy proclaiming your faith in free markets, the (undemocratic) government of Singapo...

HEALTHY ONLINE

Search This Blog