By JOHN HALAMKA In my career, there have been a few perfect storms, defined as “a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude”. When I was an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1980, two geeky guys named Jobs and Wozniak dropped by the Homebrew Computer Club to demonstrate a kit designed in their garage. [...]

By Alexander Prisant You start coming out from under the deep anesthesia. First your eyes start to open. They work. Then you haphazardly try to move an arm, your head, and your lips to speak. And none of that works at all. You’re strapped in and breathing through a machine and taped up 32 ways [...]

By Jason Shafrin One of the provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a ACA, a.k.a. Health Reform, a.k.a. Obamacare) is that it limits the profits of health insurance companies. The ACA imposes a minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) on all insurers. The MLR is the amount of money spent on covered person [...]

By David Shaywitz Businesses exist to solve problems, right?  Certainly, this is the heart of the classic entrepreneurial model: you become obsessed with a particular problem, and create a business to solve it.  Example: eBay was created by Pierre Omidyar to solve a perceived problem with inefficient markets, and since its inception has generally focused on [...]

By Dave Chase In a piece for the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, early in the 1900s, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed roughly half the workforce. Beginning in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. After many [...]

By DAVID FRIEDMAN Reductions in the cost of genetic testing and improvements in what we know about what it tells us produce obvious benefits; if you know you are  likely to have some particular medical problem, you may be able to take precautions against it. But they also have at least one potential downside. The [...]

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn There are few issue areas within the Beltway of Washington, DC, that have enjoyed more support across the political aisle than health care information technology. In 2004, George Bush asserted that every American would/should have an electronic medical record by 2014. Since then, Democrats and Republicans alike have supported the broad concept [...]

By Kent Bottles, MD Anyone who is concerned about the future transformation of the United States clinical delivery system should pay attention to the Care Innovations Summit. The selection of presentations as well as the content that was discussed says volumes about where CMS believes payment is headed. Speaker after speaker stated that decreasing the [...]

By Darrell Moon Forget Washington and the political debate over Obamacare. The real battle for the future of health care is being fought in the world of business, where tens of thousands of companies have seen their financial well-being undermined by skyrocketing employee health costs. Although few people realize it, employee health costs have now [...]

By ROBERT REICH One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.” In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an [...]

By Shannon Brownlee Imagine yourself in front of your computer, looking up information about a drug prescribed by your doctor. Your Internet search tells you that there is a cheaper, maybe even a generic version available, but you have just paid top dollar for the brand name drug. You also learn that another treatment may [...]

By Avik Roy Today, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on H.R. 1173, the Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act of 2011, sponsored by Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.). This two-page bill would repeal the fiscal disaster known as the CLASS Act, Obamacare’s new long-term care entitlement, which was “suspended” by the Obama Administration [...]

By Russ Richmond, MD The world is awash in data. It is estimated that the amount of digital information increases ten-fold every few years, with data growing at a compound annual rate of 60 percent. The big technology company Cisco has forecast that by 2013, the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will [...]

By John Goodman Just about everybody in the health policy blogosphere has noted with disappointment the failure of Medicare’s demonstration projects to reduce the costs of care. Recall that these are critical to President Obama’s challenge “To find out what works and then go do it.” If nothing works, the fallback weapon in Obama Care [...]

By David Williams How many times have you read about the staggering shortage of nurses? It’s routine to see numbers in the hundreds of thousands tossed around – representing the seemingly insatiable demand for nurses from an aging population. I’ve always been suspicious of these estimates. First, it’s not how the economy works. We’re not [...]

By Merrill Goozner It’s too bad former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t want to talk about his state’s health care reform legislation on the campaign trail. If he did, he’d have a pretty good story to tell. The reform plan, which President Obama used as a model for the national reform, lifted the number of [...]

By Joe Flower Ten existential questions will make the difference between stumbling into the future and thriving The questions have changed. The key strategy questions that the C-suite must be asking—and getting answers to—are different now than they were in the past, even from what they were last year. Most of today’s health care CEOs [...]

By Darrell Moon Forget Washington and the political debate over Obamacare. The real battle for the future of health care is being fought in the world of business, where tens of thousands of companies have seen their financial well-being undermined by skyrocketing employee health costs. Although few people realize it, employee health costs have now [...]

By David Dranove Preface: In the past few weeks Governor Romney has received withering criticism for his support for the Massachusetts Health Plan and his seemingly hypocritical opposition to Obamacare. Frankly, his responses to this criticism have not been stellar. I sometimes wonder if he realizes that he is on firm ground here. So as [...]

By Seth Roberts Bryan Castañeda, who lives in Southern California, told me this: The law firm I work at specializes in toxic torts. We represent people who have been occupationally exposed to chemicals and are now sick, dying, or dead. Most of our clients have been exposed to benzene and developed some kind of leukemia. [...]