Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
The danger of price transparency: Congress is debating a bill that would bring more price transparency to healthcare, but Budget Director Peter Orszag says too much transparency may be a bad thing. “The markets for some health care services are highly concentrated, so increasing transparency in such markets could lead to higher, rather than lower, prices because higher prices are easier to maintain when the prices charged by each provider involved can be observed by all of the others,” Orszag said. But if you’ve paid $95,000 for a medical procedure that a hospital down the road offers for $55,000 (like the man in this L.A. Times article), you may not agree with Orszag.
Who’s Elena Kagan? And what does President Obama’s decision to nominate Kagan to the Supreme Court mean for the healthcare industry? The answer to the second question is “Probably not much.” But if you’re looking for answers to the first, check out this lengthy profile of Kagan and this timeline of her career.
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HCA going public: Private-equity owned hospital chain HCA has filed for an initial public offering that could yield as much as $4.6 billion. The nation’s largest hospital chain was likely helped by federal health reform, which could deliver millions of new insured patients to HCA.
Healthcare still adding jobs: Healthcare jobs nosed up by about 20,000 last month, with hospitals leading the way. Home care was the healthcare sector that showed the highest monthly rate of growth at 0.6 percent. Over the last year, jobs in the home healthcare sector have grown at a healthy 5 percent clip.
Cancer-causing chemicals? The American Cancer society is firing back at a government report that says the amount of cancer caused by unregulated chemicals in the environment is “grossly underestimated.” The American Cancer Society, however argues that the report grossly overstates the impact of environment factors on cancer, and doing so shifts the public’s attention from things that have been proven to cause cancer at high rates–like smoking.
Dealflow: Atlanta-based device maker CardioMEMS completes a $37.5 million round; San Diego-based diagnostics company Astute Medical grabs $26.5 million for a Series B round.
The Hidden Administrative Tasks Draining Small Practices
Small practices play a critical role in healthcare delivery, but they cannot continue to absorb ever-increasing administrative demands without consequences.
Photo from flickr user jo-h