Category: Doctors to Make Web Calls in Hawaii

Clearly the most innovative move made so far in this very young year by a health plan has to been the decision of the Hawaii Medical Service Association, the state#8217;s Blue Cross-Blue Shield licensee, to make the Internet version of the house call available to everyone in the state.
American Well, a Web service […]

McCain would pay for his planned healthcare tax credits – the cornerstone of his reform plan #8212; with savings from Medicare and Medicaid, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s senior policy advisor, according to a report today in The Wall Street Journal. Holtz-Eakin said McCain would reform payment policies and eliminate Medicare fraud to […]

David Harlow is a Boston area health care lawyer and consultant who blogs regularly at HealthBlawg
Massachusetts has famously gotten many of the state’s uninsured covered thanks to the state mandate.  The “pay or play” approach taken has long seemed ripe for an ERISA pre-emption challenge (cf. the Wal-Mart case in Maryland).  The program […]

It was the briefest mention possible, but at least John McCain did touch upon health care in his acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention.
McCain spent a bit more time bashing Obama’s approach then discussing his own: “My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and […]

Fareed Zakaria argues in his new book “The Post-American World“, that the problem America faces in the new emerging international sphere is not so much domestic decline, but rather more “the rise of the rest.” By this he means that countries all over the world “have been experiencing rates of economic growth that […]

Lawrence Lessig wrote in Free Culture, that “privacy was assured because of the inefficient architecture for gathering data and hence a market constraint (cost) on anyone who wanted that data.” Privacy was guaranteed to us by a kind of economic “friction” and system inertia. Today that friction has all but disappeared and the […]

WHCC 2008 just wrapped up with a final keynote from Secretary Leavitt. Leavitt’s keynote was a progress report on the four cornerstones that have driven HHS under his leadership.
Cornerstone One: Standard Quality Measures
There has been a lot of quality metrics established, but agreement on the standards by which these will be measured is […]

The WHCC conference sessions on transparency in healthcare are demonstrating that this movement is way more than a passing fad. As all stakeholders in the healthcare system — private institutions, government agencies, health plans, employers, group practices, research organizations, online service companies — are all getting in the mode of how to […]

Anyone interested in a new payment model for health care needs to keep
an eye on the High Value Health Care Project under way at Mayo Clinic.
Its goal: Support a new national model for high value care delivery.
Robert Nesse, MD, president and CEO, Franciscan Skemp Healthcare, Mayo Health System, reported on this important initiative […]

GVanAntwerp
If you like health savings accounts, you are going to love “Putting Our House in Order: A Guide to Social Security and Health Care Reform,” the new book by former Secretary of State George Schultz and Dr. John B. Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
I missed the press […]