health wonk review 15th edition

Health Wonk Review: 15th Edition

Greetings fellow wonks (and wonkettes), and welcome to InsureBlog.

Along with my (thus far) unindicted co-conspirator, Bob Vineyard, we

try to make insurance understandable, or at least bearable, to our

fellow denizens of these tubes.

Regular readers know of my food fetish; what most folks may not know

is that I have my own personal food "guru." And so, I've decided to

merge these two seemingly disparate phenom's into a smorgasbord of

possibilities (click the "fS" buttons for a treat).

HWR is served:

fS ESI at HR Web Caf� writes that in the anniversary aftermath of the

public health debacle that was Katrina, Human Resource managers

learned some important disaster planning lessons, including the need

to be alert to workers suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

fS HR heavyweight Peter Rousmaniere, writing at Working Immigrants,

discusses how Wal-Mart is becoming the banking intermediary of choice

for Mexicans living and working in the U.S. Scary and timely.

fS Over at Worker's Comp Insider, Jon Coppelman offers some management

lessons, Ghengis Khan style. Incredibly, there are lessons to be

learned from the man who led the Mongol hordes.

fS Our friend Joe Paduda, posting at Managed Care Matters, questions

the criteria used by some industry groups for assessing quality. He

notes that doing too many procedures on relatively healthy patients

can greatly improve outcomes, resulting in fancy awards and big bucks

for the procedure-doers.

fS Associate Professor Dr Roy M. Poses blogs at Health Care Renewal.

In a post that seems related to Joe's, Dr Poses tells us that primary

care doctors are now under the gun to submit to various pay for

performance programs. Noting that a particular pharma company recently

pled guilty to a criminal offense, he asks if the new slogan for our

health care system ought to be "pay for malfeasance?"

fS Meanwhile, over at the Health Business Blog, David Williams argues

that bias isn't always a bad thing. Citing a recent article on FDA

Advisory Panels, David posits that consumers have a bias toward cost

control, and that's a healthy attitude.

fS InsureBlog's own Bob Vineyard avers that taxing smokers is one way

to help pay for health care, but wonders if that's a good thing. He

asks if targeting one lifestyle choice for special taxation might not

lead down a slippery slope.

fS Dr R Craig Lefebvre blogs On Social Marketing and Social Change,

which is providential, as he takes a look at mobile technologies,

their current use and promise in public health and health behavior

change programs.

fS Another PhD, Adam J. Fein, hosts the Drug Channels blog. His post

examines the "demand side" problem of drug counterfeiting, asking how

we stop pharmacy buyers and consumers from purchasing outside of a

theoretically secure supply chain?

fS This post, from Carol Kirshner at Driving In Traffic, discusses

recent news that Wellpoint (one of the nation's largest insurers) has

announced that they will be providing a wide range of consumer-driven

health plans, from the individual to the large corporation.

fS Medblogosphere biggie Matthew Holt, host of The Health Care Blog,

alerts us to a recent study by David Cutler, which suggests that

increased spending on health care is "reasonable value." Matthew

believes that the report was destined to be used as propaganda, and

wonders whether Cutler intended just that.

fS In what may be a harbinger of things to come, we have PhD student

Jason Shafrin on board. Jason helms the Healthcare Economist blog, and

wonders why some employers hesitate to offer generous health insurance

benefits. He hypothesizes that when a firm offers a generous insurance

package, it may attract sicker workers, driving up the cost of the

firm's health insurance.

fS Last, but certainly not least, Medical Blog Network founder Dmitriy

Kruglyak brings us exciting news about a new Medical Blog "Widget"

program, and also updates us on the Healthcare Blogger Survey.

I've certainly enjoyed hosting duties this time around, and encourage