- Antos: Against Medicare coverage for hearing aids.
- 58% of Payers Use Outcomes-Based Contracts for Prescription Drugs
- In the US, 85-90% of people who have sudden cardiac arrests do not survive. A home defibrillator cost $1,000. (NYT)
- Michael Milken: “We can now reasonably speculate about therapies that will give us the ability to clean tiny cancers from our bodies as routinely as dentists clean our teeth.”
- How Medicaid regulates drug prices.
Category: Health Reform
Medicare Pilot Turns Hospice Care over to the Private Sector
Medicare’s experiment gives private insurers the flexibility to both expand eligibility and rein in costs. The same insurers already manage most other care for roughly 30 million Medicare beneficiaries through the program known as Medicare Advantage.
The hope is they can take that experience and those skills, like coordinating care and vetting the quality of providers, and apply them to improve hospice. Because private insurers get paid a lump sum to manage each Medicare patient, they are also motivated to keep costs down.
Should You Jumpstart Your Heart at Home?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you have probably seen television shows where doctors revived a patient whose heart had stopped. If you’re old enough, you probably even know people who have suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. My grandfather had one, but I know of numerous others. Something they all have in common is they’re all dead. About 85 to 90 percent of people who suffer a sudden cardiac arrest do not survive, because they don’t get help in time.
Thursday Links
- Among the fifty-four models launched by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation since its inception in 2010 with the aim of reducing costs while preserving or improving the quality of care, the vast majority have led to neither cost savings nor improvements in quality. HT Jason Shafrin
- It can take an alarmingly long time (maybe 17 years) for empirical research findings to be incorporated into standard medical practice.
- Biden is launching Trump’s Operation Warp Speed II.
- FDA: patients at risk because of shortage of cancer drugs.
- BMJ study: every month delayed in cancer treatment can raise the risk of death by around 10%.