Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of health care:
The Incredible Shrinking Public Option: Senate Democrats have reached a “broad plan” to settle their differences over the proposed government-run insurance option, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said. Reid refused to provide details, but things aren’t looking good for strong supporters of a so-called public option.
National Public Radio’s blog provides an excellent rundown of the seemingly countless iterations for the seemingly doomed public option. What started in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as a government-run insurance plan for small businesses, the self-employed and the uninsured has somehow morphed into a “compromise” that would allow private insurers to set up plans for the unemployed, with the government’s Office of Personnel Management handling negotiations with the insurers. Huh? Where’s the “public” part of buying insurance from a private, for-profit company?
To mollify liberals who will feel that they’ve been sold out by the Democratic Party yet again, the “compromise” would include lowering to 55 the age for Medicare eligibility for some Americans. From the perspective of Senate Democrats, why not continue chipping away at a public option? Since Democrats rightly figure that progressive aren’t exactly going to vote for Sarah Palin, there isn’t much to lose by antagonizing the portion of their base that leans a bit further to the left.
Where’s all the money go? The United States ranks near the bottom in life expectancy among wealthy nations despite spending more than double per person on health care than the industrialized world’s average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development . U.S. life expectancy was 78.1 years in 2007, just ahead of the Czech Republic, Poland and Mexico, in a study of 30 developed nations.
With the U.S. health care system’s administrative costs — expenditures that do not go toward better patient outcomes — running at around 30 percent of all health spending — such disturbing life-expectancy statistics are hardly a surprise.
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.
Bad nurses: Temps might be OK to answer phones, man cash registers or do accounting, but work as nurses? Not so much, according to a report from the L.A. Times and ProPublica. Providing temporary nursing is a $4 billion industry, and the firms that do it often fail to perform background checks and ignore warnings from hospitals about substandard job performance. (Is this yet another American industry that puts profits before patients? Nah, couldn’t happen in health care U.S.A.-style.)
With scant regulation and a chronic shortage of competent professionals, nursing is an industry that’s ripe for abuse. Among the report’s findings:
Firms hired nurses who had criminal records or left states where their licenses had been restricted or revoked. At least three firms employed a nurse in California whose license had been suspended in Minnesota for stealing drugs at a string of temp jobs.
Things that go bump in the night: A British research firm conducted a study in which it investigated which sounds were most likely to disturb the brain activity of sleeping volunteers, and found significant gender differences, the Chicago Tribune reports. No. 1 for women was a baby crying, which didn’t even place in the top 10 for men, who are most disturbed by car alarms. Also notable is that the sound of “rowdiness” ranked No. 3 for women but didn’t show up in the top 10 for men. What’s it all mean? According to a psychologist from the company that conducted the study:
“These differing sensitivities may represent evolutionary differences that make women sensitive to sounds associated with a potential threat to their children while men are more finely tuned to disturbances posing a possible threat to the whole family.”
