Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
Attacking the proposed Medicare chief: Republicans are mounting attacks on Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee for the agency that oversees Medicare. The attacks are bringing the “rationing” bogeyman back, despite the fact that anyone who knows anything about healthcare in the U.S. realizes that we already do lots and lots of rationing–by price. Failure to acknowledge that obvious fact is due to either ignorance or dishonesty.
Why publishing hospital prices won’t matter: Bnet’s Ken Terry offers a powerful retort to those (cough) who believe that publishing health providers’ prices would help consumers and reduce overall health costs. “Provider prices are a polite fiction that means nothing except to the uninsured, who are often forced to pay full freight. The important number is what a hospital or a physician gets paid under their contracts with various insurance companies. And that amount is chiefly determined by the market power of the hospital, healthcare system, or physician practice.”
More trouble for Levy? Looks like the embattled Paul Levy, CEO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and notable blogger, has another hurdle to surmount. The medical center’s board has asked the Massachusetts attorney general to review whether it appropriately handled Levy’s discipline, after it came to light that the CEO had an affair with an underling at the hospital.
“If this gets out, I’ll [expletive] kill you!” Several Washington Post reporters have written a book about the “inside story” on how the health reform sausage was made. Among the “juicy” tidbits (which will only seem juicy to the wonkiest of wonks) is that the White House drew up its own healthcare plan to bypass the Senate’s laborious process. The White House kept the plan under wraps and Rahm Emanuel, who is no stranger to expletives, issued an expletive-laden warning to those who might spill the goods. If this is a juicy as the book gets, it would appear the book is destined to be an [expletive] snoozer.
It’s not easy being a whistleblower: A study of 26 pharma whistleblowers reveals that the reason most blew the whistle was integrity, but doing so took a heavy toll. The financial difficulties that come with filing such suits caused divorces, severe marital strain, or other family conflicts.
The lazy CEO’s guide to crowdsourcing: Two guestposters at VentureBeat use a whimsical premise to explain the breadth of a serious topic–crowdsourcing. If you’re a lazy CEO (or even if you’re not so lazy) you can use crowdsourcing to solve plenty of business problems–logo design, funding, naming the compay, picking the right SEO keywords, and more.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
FDA accelerates warning letters: The FDA has issued 186 warning letters already this year, a rate that indicates 2010 will be another big year for drug company discipline. Last year the FDA issued the most warning letters it had in years–570.
Photo from flickr user johnsnape
