July 2009 Archives

Doctors don't like a public plan because it will reduce their fees.  They're right.  The same goes for hospitals. A public plan will reduce the fees paid to a lot of healthcare providers. So I understand why doctors and hospitals oppose a public plan, if they're worried about fees.  (The impact on income is less clear: if we succeed in reform, there will be an additional 50 million people calling ...
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Washington declared war on waste in American medicine during the Nixon years. The current health care debate continues to center on how to make the system more efficient - and seems to echo many of the initial arguments about the need to manage care - for despite subsequent decades of bipartisan, largely clandestine attacks, waste seems to be winning.              The quest began in the early 1970s, when the cost problem ...
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