HEALTHY ONLINE

The venerable University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston will accept patients with traditional Texas Medicaid health insurance, and some patients in Medicaid managed care plans. Memorial Hermann, another large health system in Houston, will accept traditional Medicaid patients and also those in Medicaid managed care plans. Neither institution will accept the Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO silver plan sold on the Affordable Care marketplace, according to NPR , and as clearly outlined on the MD Anderson website . As it turns out, the conservative state of Texas is able to obtain best in the world health care for its poorest and sickest citizens, while the private market representative, Blue Cross Blue Shield in this case, is barring its “customers” from the best and most popular Houston hospitals, including the public system (!), and all the doctors that go with these hospitals. This situation is hardly unique to the Lone Star state. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is mandating t...

In a previous post , I described how the American health care system is morphing into a system designed to service impoverished populations, and concluded that the transition “will take time, thoughtful planning, lots of innovation and a carefully cultivated disdain for human life”. However, a new blog post from Dr. Peter Ubel makes me think that it may not take that much time after all. It seems that Dr. Ubel has been “writing a bit lately on the need for health care providers to talk with their patients about health care costs”, and it seems that some have pointed out that this sounds very much like rationing of care for poorer citizens. In a Forbes article explaining why this type of criticism is “misguided”, Dr. Ubel is pointing out that individual patients may have different preferences and it is entirely possible that a “patient who pays 20% of the cost of a $100,000 chemotherapy treatment might decide that the potential benefits of the chemotherapy are outweighed by the $20,00...