Health Care
Commentary
Re-opening a Community Hospital: Union Power Trumps Patient Rights
Way back last August, I wrote about the tragic closure of Los Angeles’ Martin Luther King, Jr.-Harbor hospital, the County’s safety-net hospital for LA’s troubled Watts neighborhood. After 35 years of government mismanagement, the death of a woman abandoned on the ER floor for three quarters of an hour was ...
Business & Economics
Alaska’s Tort Gold Rush Stalls: Eli Lilly Shakedown Stumbles
Back in 2006, Alaska’s Attorney-General (like many others) decided he could mine some gold from a successful drug company: in this case, Eli Lilly & Co. Zyprexa, a successful psychiatric drug from Lilly, has also been associated with the side effect of obesity. Alaska alleged that Lilly was slow to ...
Health Care
Ranking Health Care in the States: Promises and Pitfalls
As the scribbler of the U.S. Index of Health Ownership, the only piece of health policy research that ranks states’ laws and regulations according to the principles of free markets and individual choice, I always look forward to the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality’s State Snapshots, which derive from ...
Commentary
Los Angeles Times Health Care Whiplash!
Reading the Los Angeles Times, you might think there are two different Los Angeles, in two parallel universes. On the one hand, Karl Mannheim and Jamie Court criticize Hillary Clinton’s and Barrack Obama’s proposals for mandatory, private, health insurance by correctly asserting that that the Constitution does not give lawmakers ...
California
A Strange Way to Help Patients: California Nurses Association Strikes Again!
I suppose if I were a patient at one of Sutter Health’s ten hospitals in Northern California, now at the mid-point of a ten-day long nursing strike, I might find some cold comfort in the California Nurses Association’s claim that this walk-out by 4,000 RNs is a “dramatic stand for ...
Commentary
Convenient Clinics: Becoming Part of the Problem?
I hate to write this, but there are increasing signs that one of the most significant disruptive forces in American health care today is slowly being sucked into the same old way of doing business. I speak of the convenient clinics. I’m not saying the news is all bad. The ...
California
Out of the Wreckage of ABX1 1, Consumer Watchdog Plans Another Shake-Down
You would think that anyone seriously wanting to improve health care in America would want to reduce, not increase the administrative, bureaucratic burden of over regulation, in order to ensure more dollars go to patient care. But if you profit from the regulatory burden, you’d hardly make that a serious ...
Commentary
Twilight of the Medieval Guilds? Scope of Practice Laws Examined
The California HealthCare Foundation, hardly a bunch of right-wing fanatics like us at PRI, has published a sober, but assertive, analysis of how California regulates the scope of practice of health professionals, along with recommendations for improvement. It’s written by scholars at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for ...
California
California Health Care Deforminator Model ABX1 1: A Requiem
The Health Affairs blog has just wrapped up a series of posts from a number of folks who supported, to various degrees, the so-called “reform” that Governor Schwarzenegger and his allies recently tried to foist on California. I suppose that one could generally identify these ladies and gentlemen as “Clintonista” ...
California
California Health Care: Learning from history for a healthier future
After folding on ABX 1 1, the governor now tries his hand at the state’s dwindling budget with desperate ideas to rescind tax credits and request more federal funds. As for health care, the legislature’s “new” approach is incremental change. There are few winning hands thus far. The publicity and ...
Re-opening a Community Hospital: Union Power Trumps Patient Rights
Way back last August, I wrote about the tragic closure of Los Angeles’ Martin Luther King, Jr.-Harbor hospital, the County’s safety-net hospital for LA’s troubled Watts neighborhood. After 35 years of government mismanagement, the death of a woman abandoned on the ER floor for three quarters of an hour was ...
Alaska’s Tort Gold Rush Stalls: Eli Lilly Shakedown Stumbles
Back in 2006, Alaska’s Attorney-General (like many others) decided he could mine some gold from a successful drug company: in this case, Eli Lilly & Co. Zyprexa, a successful psychiatric drug from Lilly, has also been associated with the side effect of obesity. Alaska alleged that Lilly was slow to ...
Ranking Health Care in the States: Promises and Pitfalls
As the scribbler of the U.S. Index of Health Ownership, the only piece of health policy research that ranks states’ laws and regulations according to the principles of free markets and individual choice, I always look forward to the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality’s State Snapshots, which derive from ...
Los Angeles Times Health Care Whiplash!
Reading the Los Angeles Times, you might think there are two different Los Angeles, in two parallel universes. On the one hand, Karl Mannheim and Jamie Court criticize Hillary Clinton’s and Barrack Obama’s proposals for mandatory, private, health insurance by correctly asserting that that the Constitution does not give lawmakers ...
A Strange Way to Help Patients: California Nurses Association Strikes Again!
I suppose if I were a patient at one of Sutter Health’s ten hospitals in Northern California, now at the mid-point of a ten-day long nursing strike, I might find some cold comfort in the California Nurses Association’s claim that this walk-out by 4,000 RNs is a “dramatic stand for ...
Convenient Clinics: Becoming Part of the Problem?
I hate to write this, but there are increasing signs that one of the most significant disruptive forces in American health care today is slowly being sucked into the same old way of doing business. I speak of the convenient clinics. I’m not saying the news is all bad. The ...
Out of the Wreckage of ABX1 1, Consumer Watchdog Plans Another Shake-Down
You would think that anyone seriously wanting to improve health care in America would want to reduce, not increase the administrative, bureaucratic burden of over regulation, in order to ensure more dollars go to patient care. But if you profit from the regulatory burden, you’d hardly make that a serious ...
Twilight of the Medieval Guilds? Scope of Practice Laws Examined
The California HealthCare Foundation, hardly a bunch of right-wing fanatics like us at PRI, has published a sober, but assertive, analysis of how California regulates the scope of practice of health professionals, along with recommendations for improvement. It’s written by scholars at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for ...
California Health Care Deforminator Model ABX1 1: A Requiem
The Health Affairs blog has just wrapped up a series of posts from a number of folks who supported, to various degrees, the so-called “reform” that Governor Schwarzenegger and his allies recently tried to foist on California. I suppose that one could generally identify these ladies and gentlemen as “Clintonista” ...
California Health Care: Learning from history for a healthier future
After folding on ABX 1 1, the governor now tries his hand at the state’s dwindling budget with desperate ideas to rescind tax credits and request more federal funds. As for health care, the legislature’s “new” approach is incremental change. There are few winning hands thus far. The publicity and ...
