McConnell’s Fantasy

Now I understand. Senator McConnell thinks he’s Dikembe Mutumbo.  Click here.

Innovation in Louisville

I am fascinated with innovation and so I found myself engrossed in the excellent review of medical advances penned by Laura Ungar in Sunday’s Courier-Journal. The entire series can be viewed by clicking here. This is the kind of solid reporting that is has historically been the staple of the Courier-Journal and its brethren around [...]

Bashing Health Insurers and Tiger’s Apology

Last Friday Adam Shewmaker and I watched the Tiger Woods apology courtesy at a local sports bar that I occasionally frequent for lunch. A reporter and cameraman from one of the local television stations was interviewing patrons asking what they thought about Tiger and his apology. I couldn’t help thinking about how ridiculous the coverage [...]

Great News

Perhaps the day of reckoning is coming for incumbents. (The Atlantic Monthly)

Rate Increases? No Problem!

Here’s a cartoon from Mike Luckovich. Click here. I liked this one also. Boehner One last cartoon…the most apropos. Click here: Who’s Paying?

Wow!

That’s what Kaiser’s Catherine Hoffman had to say when told the results of a study that was partly funded by the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky. The study reported that one-third (900,000) of Kentuckians below the Medicare-eligible age do not have health insurance. You can read the entire CJ article by clicking here.

Watch the Innovators

In an earlier post about health care reform, I suggested that we need to keep an eye on the innovators. Another article that caught my attention in the Sunday New York Times this week was buried in the business section. The subject of article in the Novelties column by Anne Eisenberg under the headline, “Hospital Clean [...]

Evaluating New Clinical Technology

One is six American men will develop prostate cancer. My uncle Charlie did so before he was felled at age 69 by a heart attack. He had a great sense of humor and if he were alive I would congratulate him on becoming a statistic and making it less likely (statistically anyway) that I will [...]

39% and 17.3

Thirty nine joins seventeen point three (health care spending as a percentage of the GDP) on my list of astounding percentages. Wellpoint Anthem’s rate hikes for certain policies is getting a lot of press (here’s an example). And, like efforts to vilify Wall Street CEOs for earning bonuses, they are an easy target for politico [...]

Government Efficiency

No, this post isn’t going to be a series of oxymoronic terms like postal service, military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, athletic scholarship, black russian, california expressway, clean coal, honest politician…sorry about that. Drew Altman. Larry Levitt and Gary Claxton of the Kaiser Family Foundation show that the two large government-run health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, have [...]