The Conservative government of David Cameron is about to destroy England’s National Health Service, as we know it. While we are struggling in our attempt to ensure health care for everyone (and are still not receiving it under the Affordable Care Act), the British government is severing its responsibility to secure comprehensive health care throughout England.

Under a well designed single payer system, hospitals would be funded through global budgets, much like police and fire departments, libraries and other civic institutions. Single payer eliminates the need to provide complex, itemized billings for each and every patient to any of hundreds of third party payers. The hospitals are simply paid a global fee that covers all of their costs for the year. As Canada and other nations have shown, global budgeting dramatically reduces the high costs of the administrative excesses that U.S. hospitals face.

Truly universal coverage and effective cost containment were the goals from the beginning, but Congress and the administration selected a model of reform that cannot possibly bring us either.

‘Sorry for your loss — here’s your bill’ By Robert Remington Calgary Herald, January 20, 2012 With the family of deceased Canadian skier Sarah Burke facing a U.S. medical bill topping the value of an average Calgary home, I was reminded Friday of a quote by the late Justice Emmett Hall, a crusader for Canada’s [...]

How close we already are to meeting the limits of Stein’s Law is exemplified by 1) the current cost of health care for a family of four with an employer-sponsored PPO – $19,393 (Milliman), and 2) median household income – $49,445 (2010).

Recognizing the need to slow the increase in health care spending, much hope has been placed on disease management, care coordination, and value-based payments such as pay-for-performance. Medicare has authorized numerous demonstration projects to prove that these programs are effective. They aren’t.

As states attempt to set up single payer programs, one problem that comes up is how do you move federal funds from programs such as Medicare into the state single payer system? The simple answer is, you don’t, at least not without getting Congress to enact transformative legislation.

Technology that improves patient outcomes and reduces costs is great. Technology that increases costs, produces undesirable side effects, and provides no evidence of extended life expectancy is… well… not so great, except for meeting the financial goals of the entrepreneurial owners of the technology. And when the owners of the technology are the same trusted physicians who are prescribing it, that’s reprehensible.

On Martin Luther King Jr Day it seems appropriate to contemplate what he might say about the dramatic increase in flow of wealth from middle- and lower-income families to the 1 percent who constitute the uber-wealthy. It seems safe to assume that he would be concerned about the negative impact on the issues of social justice to which he devoted his life.

Fully predictable. Uninsured and Medicaid emergency department patients receive fewer imaging tests, and when they do receive them, they are more likely to be lower valued tests. Under the Affordable Care Act, many individuals will remain uninsured and many more will be enrolled in Medicaid. Thus this is a problem that is not going away.