The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently released its initial cut at Medicare Advantage payment rates for 2014, indicating a likely low to mid-single digit decrease in reimbursement for…
Read More
Consumer engagement in health is one of the themes of the current issue of Health Affairs. Two of the articles summarize findings regarding the effects of more engaged consumers on…
Read More
The Government Accounting Office performed a more current analysis of the likely budgetary effects of the federal health reform law, finding that its cost containment provisions are unlikely to provide…
Read More
More spending, higher quality? More spending, lower quality? Less spending, higher quality? Less spending, lower quality? Theories and research abound, the latest a study of acute care hospitals in The…
Read More
Can technology be a significant driver of health spending? You betya, look at robotically-assisted surgery. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that in the…
Read More
There is substantial controversy about the benefits of health information technology and whether those benefits outweigh the costs. A meta-study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association takes…
Read More
An unusually detailed look at one medical specialty is presented in an American Society of Clinical Oncology report which gives a good perspective on issues and trends in clinical oncology.
Read More
Several methods are commonly used to adjust health data for the illness burden of the patients' information that is being used. A new study in the British Medical Journal suggests…
Read More
While hospitalizations have dropped on a per capita basis in recent years, hospital spending remains the single largest bucket of overall health care costs. An Agency for Healthcare Research and…
Read More
The 340B program was designed to allowed non-profit health care providers to obtain prescription medications cheaply in an effort to lower overall costs for poor people. A recent paper suggests…
Read More
Nursing home residents have some of the highest health care costs and often have frequent hospitalizations. An Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality brief looks at characteristics of these hospitalizations.
Read More
Yet another piece of research, this one in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds finds at best a very weak relationship between readmission rates and mortality.
Read More
Medical spending growth has been relatively quiescent for the last few years. Especially as full implementation of the reform law nears, there is great anxiety about whether that slow growth…
Read More
Telemedicine or telehealth has the potential to bring quality health care resources to patients in an efficient manner, but like many health care innovations, has gotten off to a slower…
Read More
The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System issued a report called "Confronting Costs, Stabilizing U.S. Health Spending While Moving Toward a High Performance Health Care System", which…
Read More
About this Blog
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. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.