Should be a top priority for state policy leaders. State implementation plans for these exchanges – online marketplaces where individuals and small businesses can compare and purchase private, subsidized health insurance – must be in place by January 2013. If individual states are not able to demonstrate that implementation is well under way, the federal [...]

That was the assessment of one Phoenix hospital CEO after attending a webinar where a new study by the American Hospital Association (AHA) on accountable care organizations (ACOs) was discussed. The study estimates that start-up and first-year costs for an ACO-type approach will run between $11.6 and $26.1 million – far more that CMS’s $1.8 [...]

Is misplaced. The Ds and Rs rail about whose plan to rein in costs and deliver optimum care is best, while two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. The debate focuses on the 95 percent of the health care dollar spent on clinical care – which accounts for about 20 percent of the determinants [...]

Is a major impediment to both good health and lower health costs. A recent report pegs the cost of low health literacy to the U.S. economy in the range of $108B to $238B annually. This represents between seven and 17 percent of all personal healthcare expenditures. Some 36 percent of the U.S. adult population has [...]

The single greatest threat to U.S. budget stability is federal healthcare spending, according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Reality, some say, is a consensual hallucination. Certainly the linear projection of our health system status quo, with infinite desires meeting finite resources, fits that definition.

The Governor’s budget proposal to eliminate Kidscare and save the state about $23 million by disenrolling almost 44,000 children. If you think hospitals, community clinics, nonprofit agencies and other providers of health and human services are at the edge now, just wait. It’s cost shifting on steroids. It’s unfair, ineffective and inefficient – and that’s just for starters. But the Governor is right about one thing.

I’ve been a bit less active on the reform front this week because I’m preparing for next week’s Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference,, which will of course have a large part of the program — a keynote and a panel — devoted to health care and the entrepreneurial responses to the broken system. I produce that conference [...]

A friend of mine, happily a really good writer, is living with chronic leukemia. Today, it’s a treatable disease, but only for the rich or the poor. If you are poor and are on ACCCHS (Arizona’s Medicaid) Gleevec, the miracle drug that has converted leukemia from a death sentence to a chronic condition, can be [...]

The Governor’s Office has asked Arizona state agencies to submit a budget with 15% further cuts for the next fiscal year to help the State balance the budget. They are all posted on the web, so I took a look at the cuts proposed by AHCCCS, after the DPS went to the media with a [...]

What you really want to know, and are too polite to ask, is how sick am I and what’s ahead? Yesterday I got some answers and am happy to share them with you. I’ve been on Gleevec for one month, and yesterday’s test results show that it’s WORKING. It wasn’t a given that it would, [...]