Author archive
The phrase “clinical nuance” conjures images of a surgeon who spends his spare time restoring antique Swiss watches, but it’s a term some Obamacare haters and lovers alike are uniting around as a desired change to the traditional Medicare benefit. The less-sexy description is “value-based insurance design.”
Dr. Charles Denham rattles off names like the Clinton Global Health Initiative, the Discovery Channel, the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School when discussing those he’s worked with. Now, the Justice Department has named him as taking a nearly $12 m…
It’s paternity test time for Obamacare. Beneath the bogeyman label that the GOP leadership has attached to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the truth is that health reform has almost as many Republican as Democratic fathers. If you care about the country as much as political hand-to-hand combat, that […]
When Homer Warner first started using computers in a hospital, the computers were analog and the house call was state-of-the-art. Warner, who died recently at age 90, did more than anyone else to translate research into innovations that continue to hav…
After sitting through a 90-minute webinar by a Washington law firm on Medicare’s new draft regulations for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), I realized why they sounded familiar. In their complexity and utter failure to accomplish their purpose – give doctors and hospitals a clear financial incentive to reorganize care delivery […]
When my mother died back in 1993, the best way to alert the community was to get the local newspaper to run a news item people would see when they scanned the morning headlines. Unfortunately, our hometown paper was The Washington Post. The Post obitua…
By Michael L. Millenson I was reading a medical home advocacy group’s upbeat approach to a recent JAMA study that had found scant benefit in the concept when, suddenly, we tumbled into Alice in Wonderland territory. The press release from the leadership of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) started out reasonably enough. The three-year study […]
Dr. Charles Denham rattles off names like the Clinton Global Health Initiative, the Discovery Channel, the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School when discussing those he’s worked with. Now, the Justice Department has named him as taking a nearly $12 m…
Buried in a footnote to the recently unveiled GOP alternative to Obamacare is the admission that Republicans are not going to try to repeal the parts of the law related to Medicare reform. Oddly, neither press nor pundits seem to have bothered to ask w…
OK, maybe I misread the cover of the dog-eared copy of Glamour perched in a magazine rack at the gym. Perhaps I was confused by the multi-colored headlines promising an improved physical appearance (“101 One Minute Makeover Tricks”), a more organized daily routine (“12 Ways to Get Your Sh*T Together”) […]