Disconnected connectors

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1. Price’s Health Reform Hit From The Right I recently discussed Rep. Tom Price, MD’s Empowering Patients First Act in quite positive terms. Not everyone is on board. My good friend Dean Clancy labels the bill Health Care Cronyism: Section 401, for example, authorizes new federal “best practice” guidelines written by medical societies, designed to give physicians extra protections from malpractice lawsuits. These guidelines aren’t merely educational, though. They’re established as powerful litigation tools in state courts. If a physician can show he followed them, his accuser must meet a higher burden of proof to establish negligence. That may be a good idea, but it’s unconstitutional. The power...
2. “Transparency” Will Not Fix Medicare Physician Fees The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report criticizing the way the federal government sets physicians’ fees in Medicare. It concludes that “Better Data and Greater Transparency Could Improve Accuracy.” I doubt it. Note the mind-numbing detail of this process: The government delegates its assumed authority to a group of physicians who comprise the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC). The government “reviewed 1,278 RUC work relative value recommendations for about 1,200 unique (new and existing) services)” in the last four years. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is the agency that supervises this mess: CMS’s process...
3. Medicaid expansion rally targets uninsured in Hialeah Medicaid expansion supporters are targeting Hialeah - the zip code that saw more health insurance sign-ups than any other in the country. Several other zip codes with the highest enrollment were also in South Florida....
4. Scale to stratify magnitude of clinical benefit of anticancer medicines ESMO, the European Society for Medical Oncology, has announced the publication of the ESMO Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale, a tool to assist oncology clinicians in evaluating the most effective anti-cancer medicines for their patients....
5. The ACA may reduce ER visits (slightly) but doesn’t affect hospitalizations Two patient groups created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) - Medicare patients enrolled in federally designated patient-centered medical homes and people under age 26 who are allowed to remain on......