The Doctor Is In

The Wall Street Journal reports on a recent New England Journal of Medicine study which concludes that doctors are over-utilizing CT scans, exposing their patients to excessive, and potentially harmful, radiation doses:
Doctors are ordering too many unnecessary diagnostic CT scans, exposing their patients to potentially dangerous levels of radiation that could increase their risk of […]

It is difficult to stand by and watch the slow-motion train wreck which is our current health care financing system. The Wall Street Journal reports that Medicare is proposing sweeping changes to hospital reimbursement in keeping with their new emphasis on “pay for performance.”
Medicare has proposed to cut payments to all hospital facilities by between […]

 
Welcome to the September 6, 2007 edition of health wonk review.
I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that I had been tagged to host Health Wonk Review. To be honest, I have no idea how that happened (I’ve never submitted a post to the review, and didn’t volunteer). The submissions rolling into my inbox over the […]

“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five (people) that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department”
Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his famous accusations about Communist influences in the U.S. […]

Michael Cannon over at Cato takes issue with my conclusions regarding pay-for-performance — the federal and third-party steamroller which is the health care bureaucracy’s latest ill-considered idea for reigning in health care costs. In pay-for performance, guidelines for quality (read: less expensive) care are established, and those physicians who color between the lines get paid […]

If you’ve been following some of my previous posts on the insanity of the U.S. health care system, such as the Maze series, you will recall the looming ogre in payment “reform” called pay for performance. Medicare, and the me-too sycophants in the insurance industry, have been promoting and implementing a payment system which […]

Recently Barack Obama released his proposed health care plan, which bears a resemblance to several other proposals, such as Mitt Romney’s in Massachusetts, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in California, and a number of others. Such proposals have a number of common themes: mandating insurance coverage, provided through private insurers and monitored through a government bureaucracy; taxes or […]

A recent post over at the Advice Goddess regarding access to health care caught my eye. Like many such posts, there was a brisk repartee in the comment section on the topic of fixing our daunting health care access problems. Many of the comments were knowledgeable and informative; some, as is always the case, were […]