All Posts By

Kevin Roche

The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry through Roche Consulting, LLC. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.

Nov 01 2013

A new CBO report finds that raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 would only save around $2 billion a year for the next ten years, but that is because it assumes that Medicaid and subsidies under the reform law would have to pick up much of the cost for the 65 and 66 year olds who couldn't enroll.  The real savings is actually over $60 billion in that period.  Raising both the social security and Medicare eligibility age is inevitable and the right thing to do, as life expectancies and ability to work have both grown significantly since enactment of the laws.

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44661
Nov 01 2013

Research in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found that about half of  eprescribing alerts were ignored and about half of the ignored ones were inappropriate, but often not serious.  Nonetheless this suggests a need for refining the alerts.

http://jamia.bmj.com/content/early/2013/10/28/amiajnl-2013-001813.short?g=w_jamia_ahead_tab
Oct 30 2013

More ACA Rules

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-10-30/pdf/2013-25326.pdf
Oct 30 2013

An article in the journal Surgery finds that assessing patients' health literacy before treatment increases patient satisfaction and that only about 20% of patients had adequate health literacy before the assessment and corrective action.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039606013005424
Oct 30 2013

CMS released the Part B premium for Medicare in 2014, which will be unchanged from 2013, welcome news for beneficiaries.

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/10/30/2013-25668/medicare-program-medicare-part-b-monthly-actuarial-rates-premium-rate-and-annual-deductible
Oct 30 2013

WebMD has acquired Avado, Inc., a provider of cloud-based patient relationship managment tools.

http://investor.shareholder.com/wbmd/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=801336&CompanyID=WBMD
Oct 30 2013

A study in Health Affair suggests that Medicare cuts in payments to hospitals leads to reductions in hospital beds and hospital use by beneficiaries, with uncertain effects on quality.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/10/1789.abstract
Oct 28 2013

A viewpoint in the Journal of the American Medical Association reflects on how valuable shared decision-making can be in reducing medical spending, in light of limited research support for the notion and a limited understanding of how patients express preferences and whether patients really are inclined to choose less intensive treatments.  Shared decision-making may be the right thing to do, but may not save money.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1752761
Oct 28 2013

A study in the Journal Population Health Management suggests that over an eight year period a comprehensive wellness plan in a regional health insurer delivered a return of about 2 to 1 and saved $6 million.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/pop.2013.0042
Oct 28 2013

According to research in Health Affairs, the formation of accountable care organizations seems to be most closely associated with geographic areas where there are already high levels of provider consolidation and integration, and not with areas of high medical spending, indicating that the opportunity for savings may not be as high as projected.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/10/1781.abstract
Oct 28 2013

NextCODE Health has raised $15 million to launch a business designed to take information gained from the DeCode projects and turn them into clinically useful diagnostics and treatments.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nextcode-health-launches-operations-with-exclusive-license-to-leverage-decode-genetics-genomics-platform-for-sequence-based-clinical-diagnostics-and-15-million-in-venture-financing-228916071.html