Anti-Republican ad: Paul Ryan pushes elderly lady off a cliff.
Doctors answer with their own ad: Obama pushes elderly lady off a cliff.
Study: bigger hospitals drive costs up.
Michelle Obama caught eating a cheeseburger – again. Food police upset.
There are now 300,000 OTC medicines and ingredients available for sale in the US.
Despite high marginal products, the potential benefits from expanded IT adoption are modest. Over the span of our data, health IT inputs increased by more than 210% and contributed about 6% to the increase in value-added. Virtually all the increase in value-added is attributable to the increased use of inputs – there was little change in hospital multi-factor productivity. Not-for-profits invested more heavily and differently in IT than for-profit hospitals. Finally, we find no evidence of labor complementarities or network externalities from health IT.
Full NBER study by Jinhyung Lee, Jeffery S. McCullough and Robert J. Town.
An “observation” patient is technically never admitted and the visit counts as “outpatient care.” In that case:
These observation patients might wind up paying a larger share of their hospital bill than inpatients, since they usually have a co-payment for doctors’ fees and each hospital service. But Medicare doesn’t pay at all for routine drugs that observation patients need for chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol…
In Missouri, several Medicare observation patients were billed $18 for one baby aspirin, said Ruth Dockins, a senior advocate at the Southeast Missouri Area Agency on Aging; Pearl Beras, 85, of Boca Raton, Fla., said in an interview that her hospital charged $71 for one blood pressure pill for which her neighborhood pharmacy charges 16 cents; In California, a hospital billed several Medicare observation patients $111 for one pill that reduces nausea; for the same price, they could have bought 95 of the pills at a local pharmacy…
More from Susan Jaffe in the Kaiser Health News.
Until then, emergency rooms around the country will just have to guess between W22.02XA and W22.02XD.
W22.02XA is the code for “walked into lamppost, initial encounter.”
W22.02XD is the code for “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter.”
Entire article in Modern Healthcare worth reading.
David Henderson defends Apple: there’s nothing wrong with working 60 hours a week. (I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember!)
Does being promoted lead to better health?
Does low socioeconomic status have to bring poor health outcomes?
Do High-Cost Hospitals Deliver Better Care?
Claims about what is wrong with U.S. health care have changed little in the last century. Lamenting that “the old neighborhood life has gone and with it the intimate and prolonged personal contacts which made the old relationship between physician and patient simple and easy of attachment,” and that “still more deeply is this relationship affected by the subtle forces of a society dominated by the profit-motive,” C.E.A. Winslow, a Professor of Public Health at Yale University, gives a thoroughly modern list of the problems with U.S. health care from January, 1933:
1. Maldistribution of facilities in various geographical areas: states should have equal numbers of physicians per 1,000 people. The modern term is “healthcare disparities.”
2. Maladjustment of services in all areas: “In the rural areas, even where general practitioners are available, there is grave lack of hospital and laboratory facilities and of consultation service…On the other hand, the cities as a whole show a markedly excessive development of specialization.”
3. Waste in the provision of services: “There is a wide-spread waste of time and of overhead costs in the rendering of service on an individual basis. About 40 per[cent]…of the average physician’s income in consumed in overhead expense.”
More on cellphones and human bodies. If your cellphone has a problem, the “doctors” compete on price and quality:
Ross Newman, the 27-year-old founder of iHospital, says he can compete. A new front screen for an iPhone would cost about $150, including the cost of signing up for AppleCare Plus and the incident charge. The iHospital charges roughly between $79 and $100 for that same repair, depending on the model. And, Mr. Newman added, his doctors offer tech support and a one-year warranty on repairs. Other repair shops offer similar prices and services.
Full article by Ian Sherr in The Wall Street Journal worth reading.
Medicare’s seven-year public reporting initiative for hospitals, Hospital Compare, had no impact on reducing death rates for two key health conditions and just a modest effect on a third…
The study, published in the March issue of Health Affairs, showed that Hospital Compare produced no reductions beyond the existing trends in improvement of care of heart attacks and pneumonia… The researchers found a modest improvement in mortality rates for heart failure, though they can’t prove that this was related to the public reporting initiative.
In 2005, Hospital Compare started rating more than 3,000 hospitals on how well they adhere to basic guidelines for clinical care, such as giving flu vaccinations to pneumonia patients. Over time, Hospital Compare has added the results of patient experience scores, readmission and mortality rates, and, most recently, rates of complications and other patient safety mishaps….
But the new study questions whether any of this was actually leading to better outcomes for patients, such as their chance of survival in the month after they were discharged. The study found that at the time Hospital Compare was launched, mortality rates for patients with three common ailments — heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia — were already decreasing. After those trends were taken into account, Hospital Compare was found to have no effect on the 30-day survival rate of heart attack and pneumonia patients, according to the study.
Full article from Jordan Rau in the Kaiser Health News worth reading.
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