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Highlights from the important and the interesting in the world of health care.
The Henry Ford of heart surgery: Dr. Devi Shetty, who gained renown as Mother Theresa’s heart surgeon in the early 1990s, founded a cardiology hospital in India that charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery. His secret? Economies of scale.
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By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion. “Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That’s what we’re doing in health care,” Dr. Shetty says. “What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation.”
Has swine flu peaked? Swine flu activity is down in all regions of the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Also of significance, the American College Health Association, which surveys over 250 colleges with more than three million students, reported that new flu cases dropped for the week ending Nov. 13, the first such drop since school started this fall, the New York Times reported. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that worried Americans can breathe any easier.
Lone Simonsen, an epidemiologist at George Washington University, said she expected a third wave in December or January, possibly beginning in the South again. “If people think it’s going away, they can think again,” Dr. Simonsen said.
More problems for “public option”: Inclusion of the so-called “public option” in the Senate health plan is once again causing headaches for Democrats. Two legislators who voted Saturday to move debate ahead, warned Sunday that they won’t support a health-reform package that includes a government-run plan. Self-styled centrists Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, hit the Sunday morning talk shows to voice their opposition to the public option, with Lieberman calling such a government plan “radical.” If it’s so radical, Joe, why do public opinion polls repeatedly show that most Americans support offering the choice of a public option?
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