Our latest Potpourri captures the excitement of the holidays with scintillating items on certificate of need program effects on utilization, the public’s views on health care costs and government’s role in health care, the cost of developing new drugs and a survey on physician compensation.
Medication non-adherence has many causes and is likely a serious quality issue. Capgemini, the consulting group, has released a report claiming that such non-adherence adds hundreds of billions of dollars to our health care spending, and costs drug companies a similarly large amount of revenue.
Actuarial firm Oliver Wyman issues a report on Accountable Care Organizations, using questionable math to create the headline-grabbing number of 10% of Americans being covered by ACOs. The report basically continues the unwarranted hype surrounding ACOs as a savior for our health spending issues.
The National Committee for Quality Assurance releases its annual report on the state of health care quality in America, based on its collection of various quality measures from health plans. One striking finding is the improvement in and level of quality in Medicare Advantage plans.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is forever tinkering with reimbursement for various providers, usually not getting exactly the results it seeks. An example of this is given in research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine regarding changes for primary care and specialty physician office visits.
Another in our series of Potpourris, tasty, succulent morsels of health data food, including this week the effect of mammography screening, improving health and health costs, state costs to run health insurance exchanges, family caregiving and the costs of fixing Medicare’s physician reimbursement.
Another extensive research paper details the effects of provider consolidation and consequent market power on the health care industry in the United States, and specifically on the growth of health spending. Not a pretty picture, and the effect of the reform law is to exacerbate the problem.
Deloitte Consulting and the American Medical Informatics Association released results from a survey on the state of informatics in health care. Much of the supposed improvements in health care quality and cost are dependent on greater use of information technology and resulting data and the survey assesses progress on the objective of more and better HIT use.
A Government Accounting Office report examines access to care for Medicaid beneficiaries, finding a continuing decline in provider willingness to serve these patients, largely due to inadequate reimbursement. With a looming bulge in Medicaid enrollment, and continued budget pressure, the problem is likely to worsen in coming years.
We want to wish all our loyal (and not so loyal!) readers a wonderful Thanksgiving. A recent poll suggested that many Americans feel that the relentless focus on the shopping aspects of holidays has spoiled their traditional meaning. We hope that you have an enjoyable day with family and friends, who give so much meaning to our lives. We can all be very grateful that we live in this country, with so many freedoms and still so much opportunity.
The Government Accounting Office examines trends in drug spending in Medicare Part B, which covers drugs administered in a doctor’s office. Looking at the 55 most expensive Part B drugs, GAO found that Medicare accounts for much of the overall spending on these products.
Employee benefits consulting firm releases results from its latest survey of employers on health benefits. While spending growth has moderated in recent years, it continues at an above inflation and GDP rate of increase and employers are using multiple strategies to shift cost to employees and contain spending.
An article in Nature describes a study of over 1000 individual genomes to identify variation. This is an important step in the continuing evolution of personalized medicine, which is proving to take longer and be more complex that may have initially been imagined.
Thanks be given for our last Potpourri before Thanksgiving, a table spread with delectable bites of information on hospital readmissions and quality measure performance, health plan enrollment growth, health price rises, use of deductibles in employer-based health insurance and trends in employment of physicians.
The “fiscal cliff” deficits, and debt are very much in the news these days. A Congressional Budget Office report indicates how much of our spending difficulty is attributable to health care and lays out alternative scenarios for coping with that spending and its effect on the debt.
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 [email protected].
© 2024 Healthy Skeptic.
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