Healthcare

Want doctors to innovate? Free them!

Doctors Innovate Free 10/11/2010 – Steven Goldfien, MD –

Peter Orszag, formerly the Director of the White Office of Management and Budget, appears to have found a new career as a pundit for the NYT. The fact that he’s chosen to admonish doctors in a recent sermon at least means that the new preacher and his chosen pulpit are well-matched. The contempt for the medical profession shown by Mr. Orszag — and his boss — during health care reform is readily apparent, as he begins his editorial by stating that

[d]octors, like most people, don’t love to work weekends, and they probably don’t enjoy being evaluated against their peers. But their industry can no longer afford to protect them from the inevitable. Imagine a drugstore open only five days a week, or a television network that didn’t measure its ratings. Improving the quality of health care and reducing its cost will require that doctors make many changes – but working weekends and consenting to quality management are two clear ones.

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The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

The Wall Street Journal | by John Mackey | Aug. 11, 2009

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone: [Read more…]

Health Care Is Not That Complicated

American Thinker | by C. Edmund Wright | June 16, 2009

It is no more practical to have “health insurance” to pay for prescription drugs and routine doctor visits than it is to expect your auto insurance to pay for your oil changes and tire rotations. But we do.

Consider: if a health insurance type system existed for auto insurance, it would certainly result in those quick lube oil changes costing about 95 dollars instead of something like 29. It would require an army of public and private sector bureaucrats to shuffle mounds of paper with hundreds of mouse clicks to make sure you were eligible for your lube job, that you paid your 10 dollar “lube co-pay” and that the remaining 85 bucks was eventually approved by a Chevy lube specialist underwriter. [Read more…]

Rating Your Doctor

Forbes | by David Whelan | May 25, 2009

Last April doctors told 70-year-old Roseanne Brennan that her mitral heart valve needed to be replaced. It’s a major operation, and she didn’t want to take any chances. So she researched six hospitals near her home in Williamsburg, Va. on a Web site called Health Grades. She downloaded quality reports that detailed complication rates for valve surgery patients at each hospital, grading them on a curve based on how sick the patients were before surgery. [Read more…]