An Open Letter to North Dakota

[We've rarely (if ever) weighed in on WC issues, but this case appears uniquely egregious. Our friend Joe Paduda has helped spearhead an effort to better publicize this travesty, and we were happy to lend our support. HGS]An open letter to the press, business community and people of North Dakota: The authors of this letter are journalists, columnists, bloggers and content publishers for the workers'...

OmniCare in the News, Again!

Well, that was fast. Previously, it took over three years between OmniCare posts; this time it's less than three weeks:"PharMerica Corp. said Monday it hopes ... Omnicare Inc. will drop its $457 million takeover bid in the face of the federal government's suit late Friday to block the deal ... The Federal Trade Commission said a combination of the nation's two biggest long-term care pharmacies would...

Potter strikes (out) again

Wendell Potter, erstwhile shill for Cigna turned professional insurance industry basher, is at it again. This time, he's using the tragic death of skier Sarah Burke to indict our health care system. There are many, many holes in his diatribe, but we'll highlight a trio:"The irony is that had the accident occurred in Canada… her care would have been covered because, unlike the U.S., Canada has a system...

We're THIS many (7)!

Hard to believe, but today marks our 7th blogiversary.With over 4,750 posts, numerous awards, and a top-shelf selection of co-bloggers, we have a lot to celebrate.Most important, of course, are our wonderful, loyal readers.Thank You a...

ObamneyCare© vs The Constitution

While (almost) all eyes have been on the constitutionality of the (Evil) Individual mandate, another constitutional issue is hitting the radar, and it's pretty powerful:"Nonprofit employers who, based on religious beliefs, do not currently provide contraceptive coverage in their insurance plan, will be provided an additional year, until August 1, 2013, to comply with the new law."Seems pretty benign...

Walgreens Makes a Funny

Last time we looked, Walgreens was in the process of slitting its own wrist. The good news is, we recently received snail-mail [copy available here] from them detailing how we can help them retain their customer base.The bad news is, of course, that I don't work for Walgreens.In a particularly tone-deaf plea for assistance, we're told that "[o]pportunity for selling Small Group plans with an integrated...

Open wide and say....ObamneyCare©

Writing in this month's issue of Health Insurance Underwriter magazine (not the swimsuit issue), Ameritas Sr VP Karen Gustin opines about how dental plans will fare under ObamneyCare©. We've addressed this issue before, when we took to task Companion Life's cave-in on "young adult" coverage. At the time, we pointed out that...

SOTU: ObamneyCare© MIA

Careful listeners might be forgiven if they missed the 44 words covering his signature legislative "victory" in President Obama's most recent State of the Union address. That's correct, 44 words in a speech which, oddly enough, barely qualified as Smarter than an 8th Grader.Now why would the President elide over his stellar...

$howing us the money

Take a gander at this:Put together by the folks at research biggie RAND Corporation, it "provides a graphical look at how accelerating health care costs have gobbled up the income gains made by American families over the past decade."There's no question that the cost of health care, both its delivery and the financing thereof,...

RepubliCare

We have Obamacare. The law no one bothered to read before voting on it (and many still haven't read it).In spite of the fact it was never really embraced by the public and their disdain for the law continues to grow with each passing day, apparently we are stuck with this fiasco . . . at least for a while.Comes now the Republican...

Small Biz: RIP

As we've previously noted, one of the major victims of ObamneyCare© is "small business." Aside from affordability issues, there's the very real problem of uncertainty. That is, if would-be employers can't make at least an educated guess about the future of their business, they're going to be very reluctant to even consider...

La plus ca change...

Thanks to FoIB Holly R, we learn that the bill we had to pass to learn what's in it has accomplished, well, see for yourself:In point of fact, the overall rate of uninsured has been increasing despite [ed: more likely, because of] ObamneyCare©.Feel better n...

Cavalcade of Risk #149: You'll need a #2 pencil...

Nothwithstanding offers a unique, indeed unprecedented, version of the Cavalcade of Risk: a test. For each entry, you'll be asked a question, and offered a set of possible answers. Go ahead, give it a go![High scores win a coveted one-year subscription to the CoR Newsletter. If and/or when we ever decide to do o...

GrandRounds Today

Grand Rounds makes its MSM debut today, as FoIB Dr Val Jones hosts the premier roundup of medblog posts at USAToday. It's an ambitious project: dozens of entries in 4 separate posts.Whew!Kudos to Dr Val for putting this together, and for the opportunity to reach a larger audien...

High and Dry with the MVNHS©

Hungry? Thirsty? Best not count on the Much Vaunted National Health System to bail you out:"Four patients are dying hungry and thirsty on hospital wards every day ... 1,316 deaths were linked to or directly caused by dehydration and malnutrition in 2010."This is of a piece with a post Bob wrote earlier this month:"We need to get the basics right. Patients need to get the food and drink they need."The...

Obamacare Techno Version

One of the little discussed aspects of Obamneycare is the loss of personal service. Insurance agents: Love them or hate them, agents perform a service in helping the consumer navigate their options, help them find a plan that suits their needs and budget and advise them of potential pitfalls of one plan vs. another.Agents also...

Meth Burns Sinking Hospitals

Uncompensated care is a major problem for hospitals. Burn units are closing due to an overwhelming number of burn injuries caused by "cooking" methamphetamine.An Associated Press survey of key hospitals in the nation's most active meth states showed that up to a third of patients in some burn units were hurt while making meth, and most were uninsured. The average treatment costs $6,000 per day. And...

Slippery Slope?

Building on Bob's post from yesterday, reporting that health insurance policies will now have to offer first-dollar coverage for birth control, we learn that the MVNHS© (upon which Obamneycare© is based), has a glimpse of the next step:"Six children in Britain will be given jabs to delay the puberty on the NHS because they...

Higher Health Insurance Premiums

Santa Claus is coming to town. It is Christmas in August and all the good (and bad) girls are going to get free contraceptives.Obama want's to be re-elected and he is handing out freebies like it is going out of style.Of course it isn't his money, so why worry?Most healthcare plans will be required to cover birth control without...

Can you hear the risk?

Not being much of a music lover myself (although I was saddened by this news), I don't own a Sony Walkman MP3 music player, and my car's satellite radio is generally tuned to a comedy channel. But my better half and daughters are avid audiophiles, so I'm pretty familiar with the little (annoying) earbuds.What I was not familiar with, however, is this:"The number of serious and fatal injuries involving...

A Very "D'unh!" Moment

Over at The Conversable Economist, Timothy Taylor (no, not that Tim Taylor) makes a very simple, but very powerful point:"[W]hen you see comments about how pay hasn't gone up much in recent years, one big reason is that health care costs are swallowing the gains."And he's got the chart to prove it: You really should...

Cavalcade of Risk #149: Call for submissions

The NotWithStanding blog hosts next week's CavRisk. Entries are due by Monday (the 23rd).Just click here to submit your post.You'll need to provide:* Your post's url and title* Your blog's url and name* Your name and email* A (brief) summary of the postPLEASE remember: ONLY posts that relate to risk (not personal finance tips and the lik...

Cannon Fodder/LinkFest

FoIB Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute's director of health policy studies, has a trio of interesting, provocative and insightful posts up:■ Oops, Maybe ObamaCare’s Cost Controls Won’t Work after All wherein MC reports that the Congressional Budget Office just revealed they aren’t very successful, after all:"In nearly every...

MVNHS© Docs: Strike One!

The so-called Doc-Fix is (once again) on hiatus; Congress keeps kicking this particular can down the road, in a (no doubt futile) attempt to make it go away all by itself. But as we continue hurtling toward full implementation of ObamneyCare©, it's worth noting that the system upon which it's modeled seems to be hitting a breaking...

Health Wonk Review: Future Shock/Beer Month edition

HWR co-founder Julie Ferguson hosts this week's collection of noteworthy (and wonkish) posts, featuring a peek into the future of health care polity and poli...

Amelia's Story

Over the years, we've posed several Ethical Conundrums, most recently here. This one's difficult: Amelia is retarded (aka developmentally delayed) and has poor kidney function.She is, in all probability, dying.And she is a toddler.Here's the problem:"Did you just say that Amelia shouldn’t have the transplant done because she...

Southern Belle Tolls

True story: a few years back, my better half and I were watching Paula's Kitchen on the Food Network, when we heard a distinct - and unmistakeable - sound. We turned to each other and asked, "did they just bleep Paula Deen?!"Indeed they had. First, last and only time we'd ever heard a bleep on Food Network.I was reminded of...

On Buggy Whips and Slide Rules

Ironman at Political Calculations (host of the most recent Cavalcade of Risk), has a thought-provoking - and inspiring - post on tech obsolescence:"Think of things like buggy whips, or Commodore 64 computers, or newspapers, or DVDs."These have all gone away (buggy whips) or evolved into something new (DVD's). But Ironman points to one example that "would be instantly recognizable to a time traveler...

Medicare vs. Doctors

Suppose you were self employed and the government decided not only which services they would pay you for, but how much you could accept and not a penny more as full payment for services rendered. How would you like that?Believe it or not, that is exactly how Medicare treats doctors.They provide them with a list of roughly 7500...

Friends Don't Let Friends Use NHS

If you won't tell your friends, who would you tell?The NHS provides great care to its patients. But recent reports by the Care Quality Commission and Health Service Ombudsmen, and the well documented problems at Mid Staffordshire, highlight how the NHS sometimes falls short.We need to get the basics right. Patients need to...

Price Check, Please!

As we've discussed on numerous prior occasions, one of the positive consequences of consumer-centric health care has been increased price-awareness on the part of consumers. Of course, this had led to an increased demand for that most vital necessity: information. My favorite metaphor is McDonald's, where a quick glance at "the board" reveals the going rates for Big Macs and fries salads and Diet...

Oh, Those Invincible Yutes

In Colonial America, "full majority was reached at the age of 21." Folks who attained that age could "Buy or sell land without restriction ... Vote or hold public office ... [even] Act as a guardian."Oh, how far we've come:"Seventeen million young Americans would lose promised access to health insurance if the Supreme Court strikes down [ObamneyCare©]"And how, pray tell, does "consumer advocacy group...

Grand Rounds is up

Intensive Care nurse Gina hosts this week's curated edition of interesting medblog pos...

OmniCare (Back) in the News

When last we visited OmniCare (in passing, some three-and-a-half years ago), they were accused of so-called "pill-flipping;" that is, surreptitiously dispensing more expensive forms of the drug to unsuspecting customers, at the expense of both them and us (as taxpayers).Fast forward a bit, and we see "the more things change, the more they stay the same" in action:"Omnicare Inc. faces a lawsuit from...

The Big, Fat MVNHS© Gets Creative

In what can only be called a very big deal, the Much Vaunted National Health Service© has come up with a really clever way to handle morbidly obese Brits who need CT scans:"NHS hospitals have resorted to asking zoos and vets to scan patients who are too obese to fit into hospital scanners."To be fair, this actually makes sense:...

Alphabet Soup Update: 2012 Edition, Part 1

As ObamneyCare© continues its inexorable march towards full implementation, consumers need to be thinking at least 2 or 3 steps ahead. Case in point: Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs).As of next year (yeah, I know, '12 just got underway) there's a new $2500 cap on FSA contributions. So what, you say, it's only 2012.The problem...

HHS Sec'y Shecantbeserious Hits Bottom, Keeps Digging

Because pandering to the LBGTBLT Community apparently wasn't enough, Ms Shecantbeserious has decided to throw caution (not to mention common sense) to the wind with this howler:"‘Of all the forms of inequality,’ Dr. King said, ‘injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane"Um, Kathy? That "Dr" part is of Theology, not Medicine.Back under your rock, plea...

Pancreatic Cancer and the NHS

The BBC published a video interview with two pancreatic cancer patients and their doctor. One person is inoperable and is terminal; the other is alive four years post-diagnosis. The underlying message was that NHS budgets are delaying diagnostic work and that private insurance allowed one person to get treated early enough to survive. Welcome to our future. It's worth a look.http://www.bbc.c...

What's the 419?

Section 419 of the Internal Revenue Code outlines the steps necessary for companies to deduct various insurance premiums from their taxes. The first (and, as it turns out, last) time we discussed these was about 4 years ago, when we noted FoIB Joe Kristan's interesting post on 419's apparent demise.Fast forward 4+ years, and Joe's at it again:"A defense industry consultant signed on the Millenium...

TNR Swings....and misses

Reality is hard for progressives:"[T]rue competition can't exist without regulation."This is of a piece with Sen Reid's recent proclamation that "[m]illionaire job creators are like unicorns. They are impossible to find and don’t exist.”Tell that to, say, the late Steve Jobs or the very much alive Noah Glass, or even Messrs...