Health Beat: Health Wonk Review: Palin, Pete Stark, Ignagni and Schwarzenegger

This week the Disease Management Care Blog hosted Health Wonk Review, and did it with style. (http://diseasemanagementcareblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/welcome-to-health-wonk-review-political.html)

Spotlighting some of the best health blogs of the past two weeks, Jaan Sidorov noted that Joe Paduda, editor of Managed Care Matters, took on the “Free marketeers who have been lauding Gov. Sarah Palin's efforts to eliminate Alaska's restrictions on new health care technology and facilities.” Paduda reminds his readers that we have “a long line of well-documented, rigorously-researched studies that clearly and unequivocally prove supply drives health care costs. The more health care facilities, beds, technology, the more physicians and care givers there are, the higher the cost and the worse the outcomes.” In other words, there is good reason to restrict how much medical technology we purchase. If we buy more than a community truly needs, we’ll wind up with more overtreatment---and patients will suffer.

Meanwhile, Sidorov reports, over at The Health Care Blog, Matthew Holt has a little fun with America’s Health Insurance Plan’s President and CEO Karen Ignagni. Its seems that Ignagni occasionally forgets that she earns her $1.3 million salary by heading up a trade group that represents for-profit insurers, and begins talking about how the insurance industry needs to make a profit because it wants to fulfill its “mission.” As Matthew points out, “No Margin, No Mission” is the motto of non-profit hospitals –institutions that actually do have a social “mission” to serve their communities.

Neil Versel of the Healthcare IT Blog shares the good news and the bad news. The good: Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) has introduced legislation with some commonsense reforms, including an open source EHR, the promotion of de-identified data use, and clarification of HIPAA. The bad: the likelihood that Stark’s legislation will pass? “Zero.”

Finally The New America Foundation’s New health Dialogue blog asked Leif Wellington Haase, director of New America's California Program, and Micah Weinberg, a research fellow in the California program, to update readers on where health reform stands in California. Their entire post is well worth reading, but here’s the punch-line: “Governor Schwarzenegger’s will to pass health reform remains strong, but his approval ratings have tumbled and he even faces the possibility of a recall vote sponsored by the prison guards’ union.” Only in California.

I’ve traveling, so I’m giving you just a light sampling of this particularly well written Health Wonk Review. Read the entire post by clicking (http://diseasemanagementcareblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/welcome-to-health-wonk-review-political.html