Much has been made of the superior performance – on both cost and quality – of integrated healthcare organizations like the Mayo and Geisinger Clinics. But since the defining characteristic of these standout systems is at least 50 years of integrated history, few believe that the rest of us – namely the docs and hospitals [...]
Archive | August, 2009
Death Panels, Palliative Care, and the Dangers of Modern McCarthyism
It’s time to fight back. The “death panel” nonsense is not a harmless and amusing political canard – it is modern McCarthyism: the shameless, heinous use of lies and distortions to scare and confuse people. The tide will only turn if all of us begin speaking up for the truth. Read this morning’s NY Times [...]
My Interview on The Health Care Blog
If for some reason you haven’t gotten enough of me on Wachter’s World, I just did a long, fun interview with Matthew Holt on the always-interesting THCB. We cover patient safety, the future of IT, the demise of primary care, Death Panels, and more. I began the interview an optimist and finished it a pessimist, [...]
A Series of Concentric Circles: A Framework for Physician Payment Reform
I’m just back from the ABIM Foundation’s Summer Forum in New Mexico, increasingly a who’s who of the health policy world, our Davos. I came away from the meeting with a new framework for thinking about the sticky issue of physician payment reform – specifically, how to balance the fact that we docs are ethically [...]
Loading ...
