Dave Chase, a former Microsoft executive, wrote two treatises on huffingtonpost.com about health care were choice. Here’s one: Dave Chase: Do it Yourself Health Care Reform. and here’s the other: Dave Chase: Health Insurance’s Bunker Buster. P.S. He’s really smart, and he’s also working on a startup about health care called Avado. It’s sort of like a mint.com for health care, and a whole bunch more. Meanwhile, there are at least two other companies, actually more like three — Massive Health, Cake Health and Simplee — that profess also to be the mint.com for health care. We wish them all the best. More transparency, more knowledge, more health. We vote yes for all that. Yes, our marketplace is crowded, and we like that: validation for the idea.
“For the first time in its history, Medicare will soon track spending on millions of individual beneficiaries, reward hospitals that hold down costs and penalize those whose patients prove most expensive.” Read more from the invaluable Robert Pear at The New York Times. Commentary: of course, how hard is this? Joe Flower at thehealthcareblog.com.
The Republican Medicare privatization plan is like employer-sponsored insurance. And that’s not a good thing. Austin Frakt, Incidental Economist and guest blogger over at WashPost for the vacationing Ezra Klein.
“There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states.” Read more from the invaluable Gardiner Harris at The New York Times. A reaction: as physicians change, will the AMA? Aaron Carroll, Incidental Economist and guest blogger at WaPo with his colleague Austin Frakt.
Let’s make medical school free for family practitioners and GP’s — and let the people who choose the more expensive specialty practices pay full freight, suggest Peter B. Bach and Robert Kocher in The New York Times. The economic incentives should address the dearth of generalists and the surfeit of specialists, they suggest. (bit.ly hits suggest that the fans love this one)
