Relationship Between Occurrence of Surgical Complications and Hospital Finances By Sunil Eappen, MD; Bennett H. Lane, MS; Barry Rosenberg, MD, MBA; Stuart A. Lipsitz, ScD; David Sadoff, BA; Dave Matheson, JD, MBA; William R. Berry, MD, MPA, MPH; Mark Lester, MD, MBA; Atul A. Gawande, MD, MPH JAMA, April 17, 2013 We found that under [...]

Nation’s biggest movie theater chain cuts workweek, blaming ObamaCare By Perry Chiaramonte FoxNews.com, April 15, 2013 The nation’s largest movie theater chain has cut the hours of thousands of employees, saying in a company memo that ObamaCare requirements are to blame. Regal Entertainment Group, which operates more than 500 theaters in 38 states, last month [...]

Cancer drug policies in the United States, compared to other nations, result in higher drug costs, intolerable out-of-pocket costs, and inequitable access to the drugs – preventing many people from receiving comparatively effective drugs, while enabling others to have very expensive drugs of little or no value, wasting our healthcare dollars.

Individuals who understand the single payer model will find nothing new here from a policy perspective. What is important about this article is that it is a precise statement about administrative waste, coming from a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and published in Bloomberg Businessweek.

As Gary Lauer, CEO of EHealth states, “We’re a profit-making company.” Yes, they are a company that draws dollars (over 150 million of them in 2012) away from our heath care funds, and yet provides absolutely no services or products directly related to actual health care.

Health Care Cost Containment Strategies Used In Four Other High-Income Countries Hold Lessons For The United States By Mark Stabile, Sarah Thomson, Sara Allin, Seán Boyle, Reinhard Busse, Karine Chevreul, Greg Marchildon and Elias Mossialos Health Affairs, April 2013 The past decade has been one of relative affluence for the countries we reviewed (Canada, England, [...]

There are many circumstances in which a de facto dependent is not technically a dependent when it comes to enrollment in a health plan. Enrolling such individuals is considered a criminal offense. Many employers have instituted dependent verification programs in order to ferret out this fraud. Is this really what we want to be doing?

TRICARE is a health care service program for active duty military, their dependents, and military retirees – a program that is particularly important for those who cannot use military health facilities nor the VA system. The results of this survey should make us ashamed of how we treat the military and their dependents.

Intermountain Healthcare is a large, non-profit, highly ethical, integrated health care system in Utah. It has an excellent reputation for providing efficient, high quality care, and for being innovators in improving the delivery of health care. That is why it was surprising to see their name in the headlines reporting yet another scandal.

It is already clear that the structure of the private health insurance market that is perpetuated by the Affordable Care Act will continue to fail us – providing us only care that is too expensive and leaves too many out. Not even a competing “robust public option” can alter that. Now is the time to enact a single payer plan – an improved Medicare for all.