Medicare reform. The Wall Street Journal has an electronic health-care edition that collects print stories about health care, medicine, health policy, etc. in one place, but (as with the basic newspaper web product), it costs money. If you subscribe, you can check out three articles on July 11 that discuss Medicare reform and its potential impact on the Rx drug industry, pharmacy benefit managers, and private health plans. (They are available on the WSJ's "Remaking Medicare" page, which is a good place to visit to prepare for next month's conference committee's attempt to reconcile the competing House and Senate attempts to reform Medicare.) If you don't subscribe, the Kaiser Family Foundation's "Daily Health Policy Report" has a summary of all three articles (for free) on its web page.

Linking med-mal reform and health care reform: Michael Kinsley does a nice job of linkage in his July 10 column, A Painful Malpractice Debate in the Washington Post:

Very few winners of what the critics call the lawsuit lottery actually win enough to make it a deal they would take voluntarily. . . . So the direct effect of restricting the size of malpractice judgments would be to increase injustice, not to reduce it. Nevertheless, limits on malpractice lawsuits are a good idea that Democrats are wrong, and possibly foolish, to oppose. The current arrangement delivers justice at random, in widely varying amounts or not at all, depending on whether you're feeling litigious, how good your lawyer is or what a judge or a juror had for breakfast that day. It is less a matter of injustice than of more justice than we can afford. . . . It is a society with an odd sense of justice that awards millions of dollars to every 25th victim of what may or may not have been a botched operation but doesn't guarantee basic health care to anyone. But it is a political party with an odd sense of justice that makes a big issue of the former and basically ignores the latter. Republicans are right about malpractice reform. They may not realize quite how right they are.

Media scan. Hard to miss the wild disparities that abound in health care these days.
Example: Maine, whose discount-Rx drug scheme was recently upheld by the Supreme Court, is currently on the road to statewide universal health coverage, according to an
article in today's Baltimore Sun.
Example: Robin Toner and Robert Pear report in today's NY Times that both parties in Congress are locked in a battle over whose less-than-comprehensive-Medicare-drug-benefit-we-can't-really-afford bill will be passed . . . hanging in the balance are bragging rights for the 2004 elections.
Example: Meanwhile Medicare continues to cut reimbursements to physicians who in turn are refusing to take on new Medicare patients (it doesn't really qualify as news, but it is reported in today's Springfield (Mo.) News Leader). If Congress can't afford the Medicare benefits it's provided for up till now, it kind of makes you wonder how even a modest prescription drug benefit will be paid for, doesn't it?
Example: Finally, for a truly terrifying look into one of our alternative futures, consider the Canadian Medicare program, long a model for those, like me, who think a universal-coverage, single-payer system would solve a lot of the problems of the US' so-called system. The Canadian system is being wracked by the political problem of how to control costs in a humane and civilized way. As reported in an article in today's Toronto Star, by 1999 "85 cents of every new dollar collected [by federal and provincial governments] went to health care." That is obviously not sustainable, and yet who in the US has a sensible alternative to this picture?

Quality. Yesterday DHHS and CMS announced a three-year demonstration project to provide financial incentives to participating hospitals that provide high quality care for Medicare patients. The project will track performance data for "heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, coronary artery bypass graft and hip and knee replacements. Measures include prescription of aspirin for heart attack and bypass graft patients and timely administration of antibiotics for pneumonia patients." As described in the DHHS press release:

Hospitals will be scored on the quality measures related to each condition, and those hospitals in the top 10 percent for a given condition will be given a 2 percent bonus on their Medicare payments. Hospitals in the second 10 percent will be given a 1 percent bonus. Hospitals in the remainder of the top 50 percent will be given recognition for their quality but no bonus.

Premier Inc. will do the data tracking, and -- although this was unclear from the DHHS press release -- Premier's press release intimated that the demonstration will not be limited to the approximately 500 facilities that already track and report quality-of-care data through Premier's tracking system. Incentives will total $7 million per year for the 300 participating hospitals -- that's an average of $23,333 per hospital. As a percentage of any decent sized hospital's operating budget, that's a relatively paltry incentive. (By way of comparison, some hospitals are paying individual signing bonuses of $25,000 to get nurses in high-demand specialties.) Obviously, DHHS and CMS want to point to something they can say they are doing to improve health care quality, but in the current budget environment, the cash for something splashier apparently just isn't there . . . even for a program that CMS chief Tom Scully says will partly pay for itself by reducing hospital readmissions.

The most surprising part of this story came out in Robert Pear's article in today's New York Times. As any regular reader of The Times could have told Secretary Thompson or CMS chief Tom Scully, Premier has been under investigation for the past year by state and federal officials for possible antitrust violations. That's not enough to scuttle Premier as a partner in this project, but is it credible that no one at CMS -- including Scully, who "said he knew little about the investigations until a journalist made inquiries at his office today" -- had pulled up The Times' multi-part series on Premier and its competitors in the lucrative hospital-supply industry before inking this deal?

Good quote. Eugene Volokh (whose book on Academic Legal Writing is without peer), posted this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes on his blawg and I thought it was a quite fitting way to end our summer session together in Bioethics (as it would be for just about any course in law school!).

Med-mal reform. Modern Healthcare's Daily Dose reports that the Senate voted 49-48 to table the med mal reform bill, which is undoubtedly the death knell for that troubled piece of legislation. Wild-eyed liberal that I am, I won't be crying tears over the (temporary) end of this Congressional frolic and detour. This really is more suited for the states, isn't it?

Obits. The July 8 Canadian Medical Association Journal has an interesting piece about the firestorm that erupted after the British Medical Journal published a critical obit of a recently deceased doc. Apart from the question whether the dead doc actually will turn out to be the greatest snakeoil salesman of his time, there is the somewhat interesting question whether obits should merely celebrate the highlights and impassively report on the lowlights of a life, or should they jump into the fray with full-throated opinions. I vote for the latter . . . . it's a lot more interesting than the bland stuff that most papers and especially professional journals pass off as obituaries.

Antitrust. Modern Healthcare's Daily Dose reports that another physician group (this time a PHO in Maine) has agreed (without admitting wrong-doing) to stop price-fixing activities. The Maine attorney general issued a press release stating that his office had alleged the PHO violated a state law that allows "[a]greements among competitors on price and other competitively significant contract terms . . . where the joint activities of the providers have a real potential to increase quality of care and reduce cost, and where the joint contracting appears reasonably necessary for the achievement of those benefits to patients and consumers." So far, this year has seen a steady stream of price-fixing cases, some from the FTC, involving health care providers (mostly physicians). Sooner or later, they will get the message . . . .

Family Code and the 78th Tex. Leg. You can't beat the Family Law Section of the State Bar of Texas for its timely and authoritative listing of new family-law-related statutes from the 78th Legislature. Good job!!

And thanks, too, to Tim Mighell for his mention over at his excellent Inter Alia site!

Thanks to Ernie the Attorney for his mention of this new blawg! Now, if I can just figure out what the brouhaha about "RSS feed" is all about . . .

"Brain dead." From time to time I give a talk to health professionals entitled, "Medically dead, legally dead, brain dead, or really dead?," intended to highlight (and dispel) popular confusion about the concept of brain death (more accurately: "death according to neurological criteria"). A source of confusion are news media that almost invariably get it wrong. Ironically, I made this point in my Bioethics class just this past Thursday, and The Dallas Morning News promptly obliged with an article in the Metro section of today's paper. Reporting on a tragic drive-by shooting during a 4th of July cookout, the author stated: "Juan Medina, 20, a father of one of the wounded children, was declared brain-dead but was being kept alive by life support Saturday evening." "Brain dead" is not "sort of dead" or "partly dead": it's dead dead! Poor Mr. Medina may be on a ventilator, but he's not alive. My prediction: in tomorrow's paper, the Morning News will dutifully report that the brain-dead Mr. Medina was taken off life-support and "allowed to die." You heard it here first.

Good samaritan law. Last year the Austin Court of Appeals stumbled badly in the MacIntyre case by almost reading the Good Samaritan Act out of the law. Admittedly, the provision they construed was not a model of clarity. Texas' Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 74.001 states that the law's immunity doesn't apply if the "good samaritan" was acting "for or in expectation of remuneration," and it goes on to say that a person acts "in expectation of remuneration" if that person "would ordinarily . . . be entitled to receive . . . remuneration for administering care under such circumstances . . . even if the person waives or elects not to charge or receive remuneration on the occasion in question." Actually, not a bad idea, but under what conceivable set of circumstances would a responding physician not be entitled to remuneration under some legal theory any time he or she responds to an emergency? Taken at face value, this provision all but writes physicians out of the law, which can't be what the Leg intended to do. The Austin court read the plain language of the statute, however, and said there was at least a triable factual question as to whether the responding physician was entitled to receive remuneration for delivering the plaintiff's baby, even though the defendant's deposition testimony was that he didn't bill for his services, he had never billed for such services, he regarded billing for such services to be unethical, and he knows of no physician who does bill for such services. On June 26, the Texas Supreme Court reversed the Austin court in a unanimous opinion, McIntyre v. Ramirez. It took some fancy footwork to get around the admittedly plain language of the statute, but they got it right. Meanwhile, the 78th Texas Legislature recently amended the Good Samaritan Act. Section 10.01 of H.B. 4, the med mal reform law, completely rewrote chapter 74, retitled it "Medical Liability," and stuck the Good Samaritan Act (renamed "Emergency Care") in subchapter D (§§ 74.151-.154), making it clear that "being legally entitled to receive remuneration for the emergency care rendered shall not determine whether or not the care was administered for or in anticipation of remuneration." This was a lot of effort to fix a law that should have been better in the first place, eh?