Sunday, December 31, 2006

Single-payer system for the US: you heard it here last

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Today's New York Times has an article on the virtually unimpeachable argument in favor of a single-payer health-care financing system ...

CBO and tax-exempt hospitals

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This month the Congressional Budget Office issued two reports on the tax-exempt hospital industry. Both are worth reading, as much for what ...
Saturday, December 30, 2006

Drug wholesaler settles with New York

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New York's AG, Eliot Spitzer, announced on Thursday that his office had reached a settlement with prescription drug behemoth Cardinal H...

Middlemen redux

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Following up on my earlier post about the role of middlemen in health care , yesterday's WSJ had a nice front-page article (link good f...

When will this madness end?

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The FTC put out a press release yesterday that announces a proposed consent decree in the case of "several organizations representing ...

The spine as profit center

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Today there is yet another story from The New York Times about yet another opportunity for entrepreneurial docs (this time, spine surgeons...
Thursday, December 28, 2006

Viaticals -- something was rotten, indeed

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From today's Modern Healthcare "Daily Dose": Florida physician Clark Mitchell pleaded guilty to participating in a securities...

DeBakey's surgery

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It is sometimes said you should be able to teach an entire Bioethics course from the stories that appear in your local daily paper, but it i...
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Physicians' "verbal orders": who may authenticate them?

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It probably isn't worth fighting this fight, so I won't, but I have to note in passing that all physicians' orders are verbal or...

Nice news for the antitrust bar

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Worth watching in 2007: Nurses filed a class-action antitrust lawsuit against Detroit-area hospitals and health systems, claiming that they ...

What ever happened to the bird flu pandemic?

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AP ran a story this month ( "Experts Puzzle Over Halt of Bird Flu" ) with a couple of interesting points: Bird flu may not be gone...
Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Talking about what doctors don't want to talk about

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Death. Today's New York Times has an op-ed by Dr. Pauline Chen on "The Most-Avoided Conversation in Medicine" -- i.e. , the o...
Saturday, December 23, 2006

The Willie Sutton School of Healthcare Cost Management

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Considering the incredible profits being earned by many of the middlemen in the health care industry, wouldn't you think there would be ...
Friday, December 22, 2006

Some folks have a head for business . . . .

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The AP reports ( courtesy of MyWay ) on an interesting case that lies at the intersection of criminal procedure and a patient's right to...

Piergiorgio Welby dies after respirator removed

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The Italian poet who lost in his bid for court authorization to have his respirator removed (see earlier post ), died after his physician re...
Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Italian poet pushes the law on his right to die

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Today's New York Times has a story about Piergiorgio Welby, an Italian poet who apparently has entered the final chapter in his 40-yea...
Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Federal pre-emption of state-law claims medical-device manufacturers

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This issue keeps turning up on SCOTUS' docket every few years like the proverbial bad penny. Most recently, it takes the form of Riegel ...

It's been a long time . . .

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. . . not just a long time, actually: It's been a of a long time since my last post, due mostly to conferences and speeches the past fe...
Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Bones and tissue stolen by undertakers and sold illegally

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This CNN story is just the latest in a long line of exposés of the apparently irremediably corrupt bones-and-tissue market. How long can th...
Monday, October 23, 2006

Porter & Teisberg's "Redefining Health Care" gets raked over the coals

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I was impressed by Michael Porter's and Elizabeth Olmstead Teisberg's article-length adaption of their health-care policy book when...