Medicare prices are set by the AMA’s Relative Value System Update Committee, which incentivizes procedures instead of primary care, leading to greater costs and more invasive care.
Read more...Yves here. This post describes a pair of examples in the mistaken assumption that financiers, or at least people with connections to financiers, are the best people to put in charge of anything. Of course, whether people actually believe that assumption, or use that as a cover to curry favor with the 0.1% remains to be seen. But there is evidence that at least some people in positions of influence actually do believe it. For instance, during the famed auto bailouts, for instance, that the government brought in a dealmaker, Steve Rattner, whose investment banking experience was concentrated in media companies. And the crisis showed that the Masters of the Universe were better at lining their pockets rather than doing the job that ostensively justifies their elevated position and outsized pay: allocating capital efficiently, to the best outcomes for society as a whole.
Read more...Yves here. Lambert, in his relentless Obamacare skullduggery, has unearthed yet another ugly feature of this Rube Goldberg contraption for enriching health insurers: unprecedented levels of required reporting to the Federal government. Your humble blogger had already flagged one, that Obamacare is designed with the bizarre assumption that everyone in America has a steady paycheck. You are supposed to be able to estimate your income. How can people who are part-time workers, with employers who ratchet up and down how much time they need, supposed to comply? Or even worse, how about self-employed people, who have variable and unpredictable income and expenses, as well as the occasional collection issue.
But Obamacare policyholders are ALSO required to report on a raft of “lifestyle changes” including when you become pregnant (which means you also need to report if you have a change in that “status” via miscarriage or abortion), or a change in “household size”. One assumes that means “household” from an IRS standpoint, but could it mean from a Census perspective? Do renters have to report if they take on a roommate?
And even better, as Lambert discusses in detail, HHS also makes it hard to prove that you’ve made the required updates. Charming.
Read more...Yves here. Obamacare is proving to be a graduate-level course in the study of craponomics. What distinguished good old fashioned mere shoddiness from crapification is that crapification is institutionalized and on its way to becoming systemic. And as this discussion illustrates, one often-used ploy is unnecessary product complexity, so that what Elizabeth Warren called “tricks and traps” can be characterized as consumer neglect and error, meaning they and not the sneaky, misleading vendor are at fault.
We were early to point out that Obamacare would do nothing to eliminate the widespread practice by insurers of canceling coverage when policy-holders submit large claims, meaning when they expect the insurance to act like insurance. The reason was that it continues to allow insurers to cancel policies for fraud, and the definition of fraud is astonishingly broad.
Read more...Yves here. I might step down the headline claim to “Ebola could be an economic black swan” but otherwise the depressing point is well taken.
Read more...Despite massive failures in ObamaCare’s implementation, especially on the back end “data hub” nobody has been held accountable
Read more...Ebola is an example of the 10/90 gap: Less than 10% of world spending on health R&D goes to major health problems for 90% of the population.
Read more...The Obama administration continues its weary slog toward the goal of selling millions of Americans a defective financial product, because markets.
Read more...MDs think about you the patient as unique in your need for health care. MBAs think about you the widget as a source of profit and institutional power.
Read more...We’ve been slowly working toward a theory of crapification and if we manage to sort it out, we might even develop a school of craopnomics. But in reality, Corporate America presumably already has that well codified but has yet to release the playbook to the great unwashed masses.
As much as I am of two minds about sharing personal anecdotes with readers, my recent experiences with the health insurer Cigna amount to several case studies in crapification in one nasty package. Moreover, since the American health care policy is to force even more Americans into the health insurance regime and call it “health care,” I thought my tale might elicit similar accounts from readers, as well as input from people who’ve worked in the insurance industry as to how much of what I am experiencing is incompetence versus design.
Read more...Artificial trans fat is omnipresent in the global food chain, but the medical consensus is that it increases the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke. Between 2007 and 2011, New York City and six other county health departments implemented bans on trans fat in restaurants. This column presents the first evaluation of the effect of these bans on cardiovascular disease mortality rates.
Read more...Sending veterans to private healthcare after breaking up the VA is what CNN, the media, and the politician’s call a “benefit” bestowed upon Veterans. It is not a benefit and will only make healthcare treatment worse for veterans.
Read more...Why, at least in the US, electronic health records are all about the looting and as a result, a danger to your health.
Read more...You’d never buy a house if you couldn’t look at the interior first, or if the price might double after you signed the contract. But health insurance….
Read more...ObamaCare should survive Constitutional challenge, is profitable for insurers, Medicaid enrollment is an administrative disaster,, and one woman’s opportunity costs show why ObamaCare polls badly.
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