January 2011 - Health Beat - The Network of Care

Electronic Health Records: Should Congress “Defund” the Stampede to Convert to EHRs? No, But . . .

Health care information technology [HIT] “is not ready” warns Dr. Scott Silverstein, a clinical IT expert on the faculty at Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology. Writing on Roy Poses’ Health Care Renewal at the end of last...

Published Mon, Jan 31 2011 2:04 PM by Health Beat

Is Achieving Mental Health Parity a Pipe Dream?

The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act passed by Congress in 2008 was hailed as “a milestone in the quest for civil rights, an effort to end insurance discrimination and to reduce the stigma of mental illness.” This law,... Read More...

Published Mon, Jan 31 2011 7:02 AM by Health Beat

A Nurse Faces Her Diagnosis: Incurable Cancer

Amy Berman tells her story here, on the Health Care Blog. http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2011/01/can-good-care-produce-bad-health.html#comments Her courage and eloquence are remarkable. Facing death, she is able to express her concern...

Published Sun, Jan 30 2011 5:45 PM by Health Beat

Community Clinics as An Alternative to the ER?

I may be more optimistic than Harold Pollack that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will reduce ER use (see Pollack's guest post below). After all, the ACA provides an additional $11 billion in funding for Federally Qualified Health Centers (a.k.a......

Published Fri, Jan 28 2011 2:06 PM by Health Beat

No, You Do Not Have the Right to Free Emergency Care

Below, a guest post by Harold Pollack, who has recently joined The Century Foundation as an adjunct fellow focusing on issues of Economics and Inequaiity. Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor at the School of Social Service Administration, and faculty...

Published Fri, Jan 28 2011 1:59 PM by Health Beat

HHS: Anti-Fraud Investigations Lead to Financial Rewards

The government recaptured a record $4 billion last year from pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other providers that defrauded federal health-care programs, the administration reported Monday. This is twice as much as was...

Published Wed, Jan 26 2011 10:00 AM by Health Beat

State of the Union: Why the President Said So Little about Health Care

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama devoted only a few minutes to health care reform. This might surprise some, but I think the president made a wise decision. There was little reason for him to devote much... Read More...

Published Tue, Jan 25 2011 10:34 PM by Health Beat

The Predicament of Backache

Below, a guest-post by Dr. Nortin Hadler, author of Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America and , more recently, Stabbed in the Back: Confronting Back Pain in an Overtreated Society. I admire both books because they... Read More...

Published Sun, Jan 23 2011 12:13 PM by Health Beat

A Surgeon Stands Up To His Peers, and Fights for the Physician Payment Sunshine Act -- (Part 2 of “On the Road to Reform”)

Summary: In part 1 of this post I discussed how the mainstream media has begun the work of health care reform by making the public aware of the amount of waste and hype in the system. There, 1 focused on... Read More...

Published Sat, Jan 22 2011 6:57 PM by Health Beat

A Round-up of the Best of Health Care Bloggery

This week, Managed Care Matter’s Joe Paduda hosted Honk Wonk Review’s regular summary of particularly provocative health care posts that appeared in the past two weeks. As always, Paduda’s insights make the Review well worth reading. (I also recommend...

Published Sat, Jan 22 2011 3:41 PM by Health Beat

Health Bill Will Help, Not Hinder, Small Business

The war of words over health reform is increasingly focused on how the legislation will impact small business and employment. The day before the House voted—in a meaningless act of political theater—to repeal the “job-killing” health law, the White House...

Published Sat, Jan 22 2011 8:46 AM by Health Beat

Cancer Breakthrough?

In an Opinion column on CNN, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, M.P.H., a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy & Clinical Practice and the author of Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health" (Beacon Press......

Published Wed, Jan 19 2011 11:25 AM by Health Beat

When A Local Newspaper Investigates Local Hospitals . . .

Hackles rise and fur flies. As Maude Beelman, Deputy Managing Editor at the Dallas Morning News, explains in an essay cross-posted below, local newspapers have good reason to be wary of investigating their community’s most prestigious medical centers...

Published Tue, Jan 18 2011 8:21 AM by Health Beat

Mass. Data Supports “The Importance of the Individual Mandate”

The individual mandate to buy health insurance is clearly the most contentious aspect of health reform. More than two-dozen states have joined federal lawsuits seeking to have health reform repealed on the grounds that the mandate is unconstitutional...

Published Fri, Jan 14 2011 3:06 PM by Health Beat

Giffords Shooting: A Tragedy That Spotlights Two Important Issues

The grotesque slaughter of innocents in Tucson, Arizona over the week-end has led many progressives to focus on the violent rhetoric that pundits on the Right often employ when attacking liberals. No question, this hate-speech has created a poisonous...

Published Mon, Jan 10 2011 11:29 AM by Health Beat

January 2011 - Health Beat

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