Category: Health Care Quality

The Cost of At-Home Caregiving

The MetLife report said that for the typical woman, the lost wages due to dropping out of the labor force because of adult caregiving responsibilities averages nearly $143,000. That figure reflects the wages lost while not working — typically for about five years — as well as lower wages after returning to the workforce with rusty skills. When foregone pension and Social Security benefits are counted, the out-of-pocket losses roughly double.

Full article by Marilyn Geewax on nursing homes quality service in the NPR.

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May 10, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Gambles Cancer Patients are Willing to Take

77 percent of surveyed cancer patients preferred “hopeful gambles” –treatments that offer a 50 percent chance of adding three years to their survival but also a 50 percent chance of no additional survival – to “safe bet” treatments that would keep them alive for eighteen months.

Full Health Affairs study on “hopeful gambles” vs. “safe bets”.

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May 07, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Employer as Big Brother

WellPoint nurses and case managers pore over patient records and claims histories to see whether patients are following doctors’ orders…

Express Scripts this summer plans to roll out a program…to identify and intervene with patients less likely to take their prescriptions correctly…

Patients identified as likely to be noncompliant then receive tailored interventions to help overcome their specific hurdle. Some patients will receive over-the-phone pharmacist consultations and help signing up for auto-refills and other programs that simplify adherence.

More on the approach from health care players to improve health care quality and costs in the WSJ.

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May 03, 2012 | 5 comments | by

EPA Experiments on People

Which do you find more shocking: that the Environmental Protection Agency conducts experiments on humans that its own risk assessments would deem potentially lethal, or that it hides the results of those experiments from Congress and the public because they debunk those very same risk assessments?

JunkScience.com recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the results of tests conducted on 41 people who were exposed by EPA researchers to high levels of airborne fine particulate matter – soot and dust known as PM2.5.

If we are to believe the congressional testimony of EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, these experiments risked the lives of these 41 people, at least one of whom was already suffering from heart problems.

Steve Milloy editorial in the Washington Times.

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Apr 27, 2012 | 4 comments | by

IOM: Let’s Tax the Sick

[T]he committee concluded from a number of existing estimates and projections that federal spending on public health should at least be doubled from its current level of about $11.6 billion per year to approximately $24 billion as a starting point to meet the needs of public health departments.

Of the many ways to raise the additional funds, instituting a transaction tax on medical care services seems most promising, the committee concluded.

Entire News release. IOM’s report summary here.

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Apr 11, 2012 | 8 comments | by

Robin Hanson Has a Brilliant Idea

Do you think that other countries have better health care systems than ours? A lot of people apparently do. And representatives of other countries make the same claim. So why isn’t this an opportunity for a mutually beneficial exchange? Let the other countries offer home grown care right in their own U.S. embassies and consulates and let Americans sign up for foreign health care (better care at half the price, so we are told). As Hanson explains:

Let countries like Sweden, France, etc. with approved national health care systems have bigger consulates, and open them up to paying customers for medical services. For example, you could sign up for Swedish Care, and when needed you’d go to their consulate to get medical care as if you were living in Sweden…

We don’t issue travel warnings suggesting people not travel to Sweden, for fear of getting sick there. So why not let folks travel to a Sweden nearby for their medical care?

Full Robin Hanson’s post at the Overcoming Bias blog.

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Apr 11, 2012 | 7 comments | by

Why One-Size-Fits-All-Medicine Doesn’t Work

“If we know what those best practices are, then I’m confident that doctors are going to want to engage in best practices. But I’m also confident patients are going to insist on it.… In some cases, people just don’t know what the best practices are.”

– President Barack Obama interview with Diane Sawyer, ABC News, June 2009.

But every patient does not, in fact, react in the same way to expert opinion. Nor does every doctor. More below the fold.

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Apr 05, 2012 | 3 comments | by

Bad Law Leads To a Bizarre SCOTUS Outcome

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that a Vermont woman who had her hand and forearm amputated because of gangrene after being injected with a brand name antinausea drug could sue the manufacturer for inadequate warning of the risks; she won $6.8 million from Wyeth.

In 2011, the court ruled that similar failure-to-warn suits could not be brought against makers of generic drugs. As a result, an Indiana woman who was also forced to have her hand amputated because of gangrene after being injected with a generic version of the same antinausea drug had her case dismissed.

Same drug. Same devastating health consequences. Opposite results.

Full editorial in the New York Times.

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Mar 29, 2012 | 8 comments | by

French and US Health Care: More Alike Than You Think

[T]here’s something that I haven’t seen discussed and yet seems striking to me: how similar the French and U.S. healthcare systems are.

On its face, this seems like a preposterous notion: whenever the two are mentioned together, it’s to say that they’re polar opposites.

France has been called the best healthcare system in the world by the World Health Organization. And if there’s something everyone in the US seems to agree on, it’s that US healthcare, well, horribly sucks, although they strongly disagree about why and what to do about it.

And yet, to me, the similarities are glaring.

Read full editorial in the Atlantic.

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Mar 07, 2012 | 3 comments | by

Individualized Care

Remember Atul Gawande’s prediction that medicine will become like engineering. Here is the opposite prediction:

Soon a person’s precise genetic data will be augmented by an extraordinary wealth of other digital data (provided by, say, the continuous monitoring of blood pressure, pulse and mood, and a variety of ultra-precise scans). The outcome will be nothing short of a new “science of individuality,” one that defines individuals “at a more granular and molecular level than ever imaginable.”

Full article by Abigail Zuger, M.D. on the genomics revolution in The New York Times.

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Mar 02, 2012 | 6 comments | by
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