By MIKE MAGEE In order to save the Republican party, we all need to vote Democratic this year. Without hyperbole, Project 2025 feels similar to Germany in the early 1930’s. Their website introduction reads: “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Alabama’s 73-year old Justice Tom Parker is clearly one of those “right people.” He did not f ..read more

By ISSAC SMITH According to a recent report in the Washington Post, a $3 billion scam involving urinary catheters has brought to light serious flaws in Medicare, prompting strong calls for reform. Apparently, several companies have been accused of gaming the system by submitting fraudulent bills for millions of catheters using patient and doctor information. This isn’t the first time Medicare has faced such challenges; fraudsters often target the system, especially in cases involving unnecessary medical equipment. With a budget nearing $1 trillion, the agency has faced significant challenges ..read more

By MIKE MAGEE This has been two weeks of mixed messages when it comes to the highest offices of the land. Just two weeks ago on July 1, 2024, a majority of the  Supreme Court decided to expand Presidential immunity for criminal malfeasance while in the office that former President Trump had so severely tarnished on January 6, 2021. The Supreme Court’s meddling occurred just three days after President Biden was forced to acknowledge that he had badly flubbed the First Presidential debate, which led to a series of recovery moves (the ABC Stephanopoulos interview on July 6; the live Press Co ..read more

Pamela Stahl is the CEO of Avalon Healthcare Solutions. You’ve heard of pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) but Avalon is a labs benefits management company. Working on behalf of health insurers Avalon ensures that patients are getting the right labs at the right price, . Why are they needed? There are 14 billion lab tests and they drive a lot of health care decisions (70%+!). As you might guess there’s a ton of variation in test price, lots of test are ordered in error, many are repeated, and many are unnecessary. Avalon’s job is to figure that all out!–Matthew Holt  ..read more

By KIM BELLARD Matthew Holt is going to tell me I’ve been thinking about infrastructure too much lately (e.g., cybersecurity of them, backup plans for them), but if you don’t have infrastructure right, you don’t have anything right. And healthcare most definitely does not have its infrastructure right. We’re spending between 15-30% of our healthcare dollar on administration, and no one views our healthcare system as efficient or even particularly effective. We have numerous intermediaries like PBMs, billing services, revenue cycle management vendors, and all sorts of digital health solutions ..read more

By MIKE MAGEE I have always felt a kinship with EJ Dionne. We are both Boomers, though I am 4 years his senior. We share similar politics, religious origins, early Catholic school educations, fathers in health care and mothers who were teachers, deep New England roots, addiction to the written word, blessings with long marriages and children (they 3, we 4), and deep revulsion with Trump and his enablers and everything they represent. Viewing him as measured and wise, I took special care in reading his Washington Post column yesterday, “The words about Joe Biden I never wanted to write.” For t ..read more

By MICHAEL MILLENSON “A reform,” wrote a 19th-century British parliamentarian, “is a correction of abuses. A revolution is a transfer of power.” As we celebrate the American Revolution, catalyzed by men who broke ranks with their peers to overthrow a power structure that seemed immutable, let’s also celebrate those physicians who broke with their peers and declared independence for American patients. The British Empire believed it was exercising “benign colonialism.” Physicians, similarly, traditionally believed “that patients are only in need of caring custody,” observed psychiatrist Jay Kat ..read more

By KIM BELLARD If you’re anything like me, you’ve noticed that food costs have been increasing. Whether it is food from the grocery or at a restaurant, the bill can be eye-opening compared to a few years ago. Blame the pandemic, blame corporate greed, blame the President – take your pick. But the bottom line is, you have to eat. You can buy lower priced options, you can go out less often, you can skimp on non-food spending, but you’re going to buy food. The other thing you can do is to complain. Well, the fast food industry, for one, is listening to those complaints, and many leading fast foo ..read more

By JEFF GOLDSMITH Democrats’ despair after Joe Biden’s pallid and halting debate performance stems from the realization  that the uphill climb needed to prevent the return of Donald Trump might be too steep. What is less obvious is the awareness of the urban intelligentsia of the root causes of the adverse political climate, which can be seen in this map, taken from the Economist’s April 20 feature on declining US population. America’s economy is booming, and the gap between its economic performance and that of the rest of the world is widening. The on ..read more

By MICHAEL MILLENSON The latest draft government strategic plan for health information technology pledges to support health information sharing among individuals, health care providers and others “so that they can make informed decisions and create better health outcomes.” Those good intentions notwithstanding, the current health data landscape is dramatically different from when the organizational author of the plan, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, formed two decades ago. As Price and Cohen have pointed out, entities subject to federal Health Insurance Portabi ..read more