By Evan Falchuk
Fortune magazine has made some news recently about the impact of health care reform on large employers:
Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill’s critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.
The only trouble? There’s no way these employers are seriously thinking about doing this.
By Evan Falchuk
Giving people “incentives” to spend their money wisely is a growing part of the solution to rising health care costs. Give people financial responsibility for their health care decisions, the thinking goes, and they’ll make cost-effective choices.
It’s usually done by having people pay part of the cost of their employer-provided health coverage, and through things like higher deductibles and co-pays. Today, on average, people in the private sector pay 20% or more of the cost of their coverage. The trend is for this number to go up.
But it’s not true everywhere.
If you look in the public sector you see a different, more troubling story. It’s a lesson in what can happen when incentives go wrong in health care. (more…)
Some thoughts for a Friday.
What do you think?
By Evan Falchuk
Grand Rounds is the ultimate blog carnival for the health care blogosphere.
It is the place to go each week to find out what opinion-makers in health care blogging are talking about. (Go check out this week’s edition at Suture for a Living).
I’m hosting the next Grand Rounds, this Tuesday March 30. My theme: Health Care Reform.
How will it affect your life, your medical practice, your experience as a patient, as an insured, an employer, an employee, someone without insurance? What are your reactions to the politics, and what do you think will happen next? I’m asking for your candid views on health care reform seen from whatever perspective you bring. Medicine, politics, business, humor, left, right, center, up, down, you name it.
Let’s have this next Grand Rounds be The Mother of All Health Care Reform Roundups.
Instructions on how to submit your post are below.
By Evan Falchuk
Since the 2000 Presidential election- and most especially since the world-changing events of October 17, 2004, I’ve known this: don’t assume anything is over until it’s over.
Still, I’m going to bed so I’m going to give you my six quick reactions to the reform plan, based on the assumption it’s about to get voted in.
UPDATE: I stayed up, and it passed.
By Evan Falchuk
Until this morning I hadn’t heard the word “death panels” in a discussion about health care reform in a long time.
But then the Vice President started talking yesterday. And so if you wonder – like I have – about why myths about death panels live on, just read what he has to say about why we need this reform plan.
By Evan Falchuk
The perpetual anxiety machine called Health Care Reform keeps spinning. Yesterday, it was President Obama’s turn to give it a push, on Fox News.
The interview is getting attention for its testy exchanges, but I thought the President did just fine.
What surprised me was how unaware he seems to be, like other politicians, of how their words stoke anxiety over their reform plans.
By Evan Falchuk
The other day, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post wondered if the reason health care reform was running into so much trouble was because of a sort of conspiracy. According to Klein, it was the forces of the “health care industry,” with their economic and political power, blocking reform, like they had for decades.
Today we can see how very deep this conspiracy really is.
By Evan Falchuk
Why has health care reform run into so much trouble?
Well, it could be because people think reform plans will affect them in ways they aren’t going to like. Or because people don’t believe politicians in Washington who say that spending huge amounts of money will actually save money. Or because confusing mixed messages and ever-shifting sales pitches create a lot of anxiety about what’s really going on. It could be all of those things.
Or, it could be something more….sinister….
