Posts Tagged ‘Health Costs’


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  • As Health-Care Finale Gets Closer, Both Sides Boost Spending

    Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 02:30 | Comments Off

    It’s crunch time in the fight over a health-care bill, so groups for and against the legislation are getting ready for a final push before congressional votes that could come later this month.

    These efforts take money, of course, and advocate groups have put together war chests, much of it slated to go to advertising. Here are some of the spending plans outlined in a WSJ report this morning:

    A business coalition backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups ..read more
  • Health-Insurance Top Hats Take Heat at White House

    Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 03:46 | Comments Off

    Five CEOs from the health-insurance big dogs (UnitedHealth, WellPoint, etc.) are at the White House this morning to discuss — or more accurately, take flack — over the health overhaul’s issue de jour: rising insurance premiums.

    The leadup to the meeting has been disorganized and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on or who is really going to take the CEOs to task. HHS pushed out a press release on Feb. 24 saying the meeting would be yesterday at the ..read more

  • Health Summit: They Came, They Talked, They Left Much Undone

    Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:14 | Comments Off

    Well, there was no breakthrough of understanding between Democrats and Republicans over health care at today’s summit, but there were areas of agreement on some issues. Of course even where there were shared goals, there was division over how to achieve them.

    But the aim of the summit was to find shared ground, so here are some small patches of agreement during the session:

    Medicare malpractice: Republicans have push hard for curbs on malpractice suits to cut costs, something the Democrats ..read more

  • What Obama Wants in the Health-Care Overhaul

    Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 04:21 | Comments Off

    President Obama has juggled the health-overhaul plans approved by the House and the Senate and added some twists of his own to come up with a White House proposal he hopes can win enough support for passage in both chambers.

    The Obama plan is crafted mainly from the Senate-passed bill, but not entirely. Here are some of the big points in the proposal, as posted on the White House Web site:

    The plan’s cost is pegged at $950 billion over a decade — ..read more
  • Mass. Governor Wants to Cap Hospital, Doctor Rate Increases

    Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 03:04 | Comments Off

    Now that it’s expanded health-insurance coverage to nearly all of its citizens, Massachusetts is trying to figure out what to do about the rapid rise of health costs.

    The latest proposal comes from the state’s governor, Deval Patrick, who yesterday proposed a bill that would give the state the power to review — and, in some cases, reject — rate increases by doctors and hospitals.

    Here’s a key paragraph from the bill:

    Any contract under which provider payments increase by an amount ..read more

  • How Much Should Cancer Drugs Cost?

    Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 08:05 | Comments Off

    Suppose a hypothetical drug cost $10 million, was likely to extend life by only a day or two and didn’t improve quality of life. Should insurance pay for the drug?

    Probably not — it would increase the cost for everyone paying premiums, without doing much to help the sick. But where do you draw the line?

    Real-world drugs are both cheaper and more helpful than our hypothetical example. Still, many new cancer drugs costs tens of thousands of dollars per ..read more

  • What Costs $282 Million an Hour?

    Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 01:11 | Comments Off

    The U.S. spent $2.472 trillion on health care last year, according to a paper out today in the journal Health Affairs. That’s $282 million an hour.

    Health spending as a percent of GDP — a key metric that shows how much of all U.S. spending goes to health care — rose from 16.2% in 2008 to 17.3% in 2009, far higher than any other industrialized country. That’s the largest one-year increase since 1960, when the feds started closely tracking national health ..read more

  • Why Do Some Hospitals Charge Twice As Much As Others?

    Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 05:07 | Comments Off

    Because they can.

    Some Massachusetts hospitals charge private insurers twice as much as other hospitals. It’s not because they deliver higher quality care or treat sicker patients. It’s not because they treat a different mix of uninsured, Medicare, Medicaid and private-insurance patients.

    It’s because they have market leverage and can negotiate higher prices in their contracts with insurance companies.

    That’s the finding of a report out today from the office of Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley. (The report was in the works long ..read more

  • Study: Higher Co-Pays Mean More Trips to the Hospital

    Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 09:01 | Comments Off

    A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine has a provocative finding: Bigger co-payments for primary-care and specialty doctor visits were tied to more in-patient hospital time for elderly patients.

    The implication is that people avoided the doctor’s office to save money, then ended up in the hospital when their problems weren’t detected or treated in their early stages. The apparent effect seemed stronger among people living in low-income areas, and for those with high blood pressure, diabetes ..read more

  • Gawande as Gladwell: Why Health Care Is Like Farming

    Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 06:44 | Comments Off

    Rising health-care costs are a problem that can never be solved outright; they can only be managed in an eternal, iterative way. So including a bunch of little pilot projects in the Senate health-care bill — rather than a few big, sweeping measures — is a step in the right direction, Atul Gawande argues in this week’s New Yorker.

    Gawande, a Harvard surgeon who worked in the Clinton White House, got a ton of attention earlier this year after he ..read more