You the patient are really not the customer of your primary care physician. Since the insurer will determine whether and how much the physician will be paid for attending to your needs, you are largely a bystander in the relationship. The doctor’s customer has become the insurer. This is part of the crisis in primary […]
American healthcare reform is desperately needed. We’ve had massive changes in healthcare since the 1990s. Hospital admissions have decreased (average daily census decreased 31% from 1980 to 2010, while the US population increase 36%). Recent recent massive staff layoffs in leading medical centers and healthcare systems. Closure of many hospitals, especially rural hospitals. Hospital Outpatient revenues […]
Let’s face it. Health insurers have been notoriously bad at creating a positive customer experience. (As a side note, we had a great conversation about this during last night’s #hcpt tweet chat on healthcare price transparency.) But as the industry shifts from one that’s primarily B2B to one that’s increasingly B2C, insurers are putting more […]
The Wall Street Journal today published an op-ed from one of the self-proclaimed “losers” of healthcare reform — a woman who has, against the odds, survived stage 4 gallbladder cancer. Edie Littlefield Sundby writes that her insurer, United Healthcare, has paid some $1.2 million to help her stay alive, without hassling her about any of […]
“CMS is sitting on so much data; it’s a goldmine,” said Giovanni Colella, CEO and co-founder of Castlight Health, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance on Tuesday. “Making that data accessible will help everyone better understand quality of care and cost of care.” But data alone won’t drive down healthcare costs. Colella joined TIME […]
In an effort to ensure a smooth integration of its most recent acquisition, WellPoint (NYSE:WLP) will reorganize into four business units, including distinct units for Medicare and Medicaid. The Indianapolis insurer agreed to buy Amerigroup in July for $4.9 billion, a move that will boost its presence in the Medicaid market. Bloomberg reported that interim […]
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.
Our care is generally good in the United States but not as good as it could be nor as good as it should be. There are multiple problems to consider. First, ours is a medical care system not a health care system. We focus on disease once it has occurred but give relatively little attention […]
