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The Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society is testing how using technology to monitor seniors' health can save money on medical costs and help seniors feel secure enough to "age in place."
This metaphor may be useful in decoding the gradations and complexities of insurance coverage and access to care.
Welcome to the world of Internet-enabled health apps. The question, however, is whether these new tools will bring about fundamental health system change.
Accountable care organizations will confront questions, including whether this new model for delivering medical treatment has the muscle to overcome the system's entrenched incentives.
The Medicare program is betting on a new course of action to curb patient harm. The effort is pegged to the success of a little-known entity called a "hospital engagement network."
A bike accident sent Michael Millenson's wife to three hospitals. It led him to offer a unique perspective on the health care system.
Two experts want to change hospital care in a way that may well rank as both the most commonsensical and most hopeless health reform proposal ever.
Newt Gingrich's relationship with the health policy community, which has been a critical component of his climb back to political prominence, appears to have been more rebranding than reinvention.
When writing the final ACO rules, CMS has the chance to spin the dross of the current regulations into something of genuine value to providers, even if it's not quite Rumpelstiltskin-quality gold. If the feds fail, it is all of us, not just those on Medicare program, who could live unhappily ever after.
Although cynics may claim conservative credentials, their view of government is really nothing more than a quarrel about its cost. It brings to mind Oscar Wilde's immortal phrase, "The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
The launch of Medicare's Physician Compare website should have been a watershed event in the long campaign for health care transparency and patient empowerment. But, so far, it hasn't been.
A good story involves drama and conflict. It's a great story when a federal judge with Republican ties nixing the president's achievement in ensuring access to care for all. But a couple of reports about hospitals avoidably killing tens of thousands of Americans once they have that access to care apparently has little, if any, drama at all.
Come with me to the land of happy health reform. It is a place where Republicans and Democrats find common ground, a place where physicians, hospitals and health insurers sit together as partners, a place where criticism is respectful, not rancorous. It is the world of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).
Twenty-seven years ago, President Ronald Reagan and a Congress split between Republican and Democratic control agreed to a radical new payment scheme for Medicare. The resulting legislation trimmed billions of dollars from the federal budget and caused medical inflation to plummet, yet still maintained quality of care.
Perhaps the political and media elite shouldn't wait for an impending presidential election to pay attention to what Iowa has to say.
What the uninsured are missing, plain and simple, is a group of individuals with the passion to organize them around the issue.
President Obama has repeatedly promised that providing every American affordable access to quality health care won't cost more money than we'll save through reform, but he's recently raised the stakes even further. Health care reform, he has said, would "foster economic growth" and "unleash America's economic potential."
I was on a phone call with fellow health policy types back during the presidential primary season when the conversation turned to pay-for-performance.
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