August 2009
138 posts
This chart pissed off a liberal designer.
Remember this Republican-produced chart:
Here’s the same chart produced by a designer specializing in infoesthetics:
Along with an accompanying letter to the Republican entitled “Do not fuck with graphic designers”
Dear Rep. Boehner, Recently, you released a chart purportedly describing the organization of the House Democrats’ health plan. I think Democrats,...
July 2009
75 posts
1 tag
What's Wrong With a Single-Payer System? →
soupsoup:
I know the good doctor Jay Parkinson has addressed this before, but I think it’s worth taking another look.
Thanks…it’s actually very simple. It doesn’t matter who pays for healthcare if doctors are incentivized to do as much as they can and the processes of delivering healthcare are such a convoluted mess with no deliverer nor payor of healthcare responsible for your...
HSAs and Choice
innonate:
For the first time in my life, I don’t have Dental Insurance.
I do, however, have an HSA which can be used for all dental-related expenses.
Today, I went to my 6 month dentist appointment. At the start, they wanted to give me my yearly x-ray, and so — now that I’m in control of my medical expenses — I questioned the necessity of them.
In the end I decided to spring for the extra $50...
Obama's Eight Points →
soupsoup:
thepoliticalpartygirl:
from Ezra Klein/The Washington Post
Barack Obama is going on the road today with a retooled pitch for health-care reform. In particular, he’s emphasizing how reform will help the rest of us. To dramatize this, the White House has come up with the eight guarantees that will be written into health care bill:
No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions:...
Best. Comment. Ever. →
This is, without a doubt, the best comment ever on TechCrunch. Left by “J” on MG’s latest iPhone rant about the Google Voice debacle. Beautiful.
AT&T: You want answers?
TechCrunch: We think we’re entitled to them.
AT&T: You want answers?!
TechCrunch: We want Google Voice on our iPhones.
AT&T: You can’t handle the iPhone with Google Voice! Son, we operate on network that has...
Top 7 Places to Watch Great Minds in Action →
My Pop!Tech talk is featured on Mashable today. If you haven’t seen it, check it out.
Recalcitrant Blue Dogs Raked In Health Industry... →
The seven Blue Dog Democrats holding up health care reform legislation in the House Energy and Commerce Committee have received tens of thousands more dollars from health and insurance interests than other Democrats on the same committee, a new report finds.
An analysis of campaign finance data by the Public Campaign Action Fund finds a fairly strong correlation between private industry...
blip.tv: the next generation →
soupsoup:
bliptv
You’d have to be nuts not to syndicate your content with blip.tv
“The Federal Reserve has benefited for decades from the notion that it is...”
– Elliot Spitzer, Fed Reserve is a Ponzi Scheme and an Inside Job (via soupsoup) (via mikehudack)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-7-26) →
The National (42)
Beirut (31)
JJ (30)
Yo La Tengo (30)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (19)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
How much of our medical research is being spent on creating newer, more efficient and streamlined models of healthcare delivery combined with new models of healthcare payment? How much money is being spent on creating microcosms/test markets for innovative healthcare systems on a micro-level?
The NIH invests over $30.5 billion annually in medical research for the American people.
...
Health Care Reform and You →
WILL I PAY LESS? Two factors could help drive down the premiums for those who are insured. In the short-term, if reform manages to cover most of the uninsured, that should greatly reduce the amount of charity care delivered by hospitals and eliminate the need for the hospitals to shift such costs to patients who have private insurance. One oft-cited study estimates that cost-shifting to cover...
“If your entire business can be undermined by someone copying your headline and a...”
– Mike Masnick, How Reuters Should Be Responding to AP’s Suicide (via soupsoup)
Things never seem to change (Clay Shirky):
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the...
From a friend:
Apparently the American Medical Association has weighed in on the president’s new health care package…. The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves. The Gastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve. The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a...
Salaries for Doctors, Not Fees →
An excellent article in the Times highlighting Bassett Hospital in New York where they pay their physicians a salary. Their costs are in the bottom 10% of NY Hospitals but their quality ranks in the top 90%.
This is true across the board. Fragmenting doctors into independent practitioners tied together by nothing but a desire to get paid as much as they can always leads to markedly lower...
“It is on the sociological level, though, that we’re missing the boat most...”
– Interesting.
American health care, like America, is innovative and wasteful. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine
(via heyitsnoah)
Noah…that’s exactly right. I’ve been doing a lot of personal thinking lately about the institutions/companies/things that people are a typically...
On Healthcare, Obama Needs More Drama →
The White House has chosen, in other words, to turn the Commander in Chief into the Accountant in Chief.
Bad decision. Very bad decision.
Listening to the President roll out massive, tangled descriptions of one set of expenditures “incentivizing” the cost differential of a second set of expenditures was the political equivalent of clipping off a birds wings and then pushing it out of plane...
Healthspottr – Leading Minds. Leading Change.... →
I was in San Francisco yesterday for the launch of a new company called Healthspottr. From their site:
“We believe in the future of healthcare. We exist to showcase emerging innovations and the new faces of leadershop who will bring this future to you.”
They created a list (in no particular order) of 100 of the most creative and influential innovators working in healthcare...
I was in Silicon Valley yesterday. I’m so happy I live in New York City.
“Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason — who the...”
– Bill Maher (via azspot) This has always infuriated me. (via asprettyasasong) (via mikehudack) (via soupsoup)
“If somebody told you that there is a plan out there that is guaranteed to double...”
– Obama Moves to Reclaim the Debate on Health Care - NYTimes.com (via shaneguiter / asprettyasasong) (via mattlehrer)
If Toyota tried to build a higher quality, less expensive car today without changing the process of manufacturing that car, how do you think they’d go about doing that?
Even better, the assembly line for manufacturing that car was built about a hundred years ago and was designed to make any kind of car imaginable.
In short, Toyota simply couldn’t do it. Investing more and more money...
“Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts,...”
– -Atul Gawande, MD, MPH
From the comments:
Re: my post
e-Patient Dave says:
Yeah, perfect - something like this is my fav way to introduce high-tech newbies to the world of healthcare. “Dude, this is VAST - imagine THIRTY Microsofts AND thirty Googles.” re the odds of change: consider how much resistance you’d get if you tried to eliminate 10 companies the size of Microsoft and 10 Googles. (That’s what...
“To reduce waste and improve quality means organizing ourselves in ways that...”
– Atul Gawande on the conundrum facing doctors, in an interview with Ezra Klein (via sleuth)
The most dynamic, most talked about companies on the internet (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Craigslist and countless other little companies who are changing our worldview and our economic future)….if you add the yearly revenues up for all of these companies they are crying in the ocean compared to the cost of healthcare in America.
Yearly revenues:
Google = $22 billion
Apple = $32...
How much longer is the average person/business in America going to accept paying double what healthcare should cost? Because in just about 6 more years, the cost of health insurance (split between you and your employer) will consume 40% of your pre-tax income. I’m not being an absurd alarmist. I’m being a realist basing this question on the rise of the cost of health insurance in the...
Why I'm so optimistic.
I very much believe that “healthcare reform” (if we see any “reform”) will be legislated handouts to those current players who spend the most on lobbyists. I have no faith in our government to do the right thing given that our government feels the need to protect corporate interests more than citizen interests.
However, companies come and companies go. Ford lost. Enron...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-7-19) →
Modest Mouse (36)
Bon Iver (17)
Wilco (14)
Frightened Rabbit (13)
Willie Nelson (13)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Drug Makers Circumvent Co-Pays Using Rebates →
Here’s a perfect example of how all of the stakeholders in our Sickness Industry are pitted against one another:
Here’s how a co-pay for a medicine is supposed to work: Insurers set up a tiered system where patients fork over a smaller co-pay for cheaper drugs and a higher one for more expensive, brand-name drugs. The setup is supposed to encourage patients to use cheaper generics.
But...
Welcome to the new Hello Health! →
The next evolution of Hello Health went live today. It’s essentially an entirely new everything and one we’ve been working on for the past year.
It’s now possible for anyone in the United States to sign up for Hello Health and use it to store your medical information. We’ll let you know when doctors open in your neighborhood. And it’s totally free to create an...
“If you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your insurance, you...”
– Barack Obama
This is bullshit. You can’t even keep your doctor or insurance now let alone in the proposed legislation. Your employer decides what your options are, and if they think they can get a better deal elsewhere, they will, whether you like them or not. I positively despise when politicians...
Rationing healthcare →
Can you put a dollar value on a human life? Peter Singer writes that the US needs to do just that if we’re serious about making our healthcare system work.
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that...
My Walter Cronkite story
sharingtime:
I was backstage at Letterman sometime in 2002. Cronkite would come on the show occasionally as a guest, and the night I happened to be working the door, he was there.
You could tell he was a nice man by the way he treated the staff. Smiling and shaking hands after his segment, he was about to exit the backstage doors and go back on the street. He paused for a second next to his...
Is Ikea the Paragon of Discount Wastefulness? →
I refuse to shop at Ikea. It is the epitome of lazy consumerism…you buy total crap that falls apart in less than a year and are forced to throw away large things in our landfills and re-buy another piece of crap.
If I purchase anything for my home (I’m a minimalist), I purchase through Highbrow Furniture. I buy classics like this, this, and this that are meant to to last for decades....
It’s illegal for insurance companies to reduce your premiums for your good behavior. It’s legal for them to increase your premiums for your genetic diseases.
“I can’t conceive of inventing a pill that would save lives, then charging money...”
– Twitter / Clayton Cubitt (via claytoncubitt)
Should doctor services also be free? And then we can make food free as well? And artists should give away their art too?
Come on…all of life is a business. It’s just a matter of practicing ethical, restrained business that’s based on...
Healthcare reform = healthcare regulation
I’d rather talk about what can we as doctors do vs. what can’t we do. I’m afraid that’s not being talked about.
Old people love the Wii!!!! →
Awesome…
Sales of video games — an $8 billion industry once thought recession-proof — have plummeted in 2009. May alone showed a 23 percent drop from the same month last year. And the horizon looks bleak, since disposable income tends to tighten in an uncertain economy. The industry, therefore, would be smart to look to a new, seemingly unlikely, audience: the 80 million Baby...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-7-12) →
The National (34)
Wilco (23)
Sunset Rubdown (13)
Grizzly Bear (12)
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (11)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz