Tipping the Odds for a Maker of Heart Devices
By BARRY MEIER
Las Vegas is a city of few sure bets. But there are overwhelming odds on one thing — the brand of heart device that patients at a major hospital get.
Within the last few years, a little known company called Biotronik has cornered the market on pacemakers and defibrillators at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, Last year, 250 of the 263 patients, or 95 percent, who had a heart device implanted at the hospital center got one made by Biotronik.
The company’s hold at the hospital center is all the more striking because its implants were not used there before 2008, and its national share of the heart-device market barely exceeds 5 percent, according to industry estimates.
BUY THE HEALTH CARE LAW? YES | LAURENCE TRIBE
THERE’S PLENTY to be said as a policy matter both for and against the Affordable Care Act, but it’s beyond reasonable debate that it complies fully with the Constitution. Few doubt that most of its provisions, including those requiring health insurers to cover people regardless of preexisting conditions or current illness, fall squarely within Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. The one provision whose constitutionality is questioned is the individual mandate, the requirement that everyone who can afford to do so buy health insurance unless otherwise covered by an employer or by another federal program like Medicare.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/04/03/congress_can_compel_action_due_to_public_necessity/
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/04/03/congress_can_compel_action_due_to_public_necessity/
Your health care dollars at work!!!:
Complex health-care law turns into payday for consultants
By Bara Vaida, Saturday, April , 7:00 PM
For months, said Washington health-care attorney Rene Quashie, his phone has been “ringing off the hook,” with hospital and doctor clients wanting advice on how to reorganize themselves to get new Medicare bonuses under the health-care law. Handling such questions, said Quashie, an associate with the firm Drinker Biddle & Reath, is sure to be “a growth area” for his firm.
And a lucrative one.
Mitt's health care defense | |
| LAS VEGAS — Mitt Romney directly addressed the Obama administration’s backhanded plaudits of his Massachusetts health care law Saturday, defending the law's controversial individual mandate for the first time and promising that it wouldn't impede an aggressive attack on the president and his health care policy. "I will take [President Barack Obama] head on and aggressively if I'm the nominee," Romney told about 150 members of the Republican Jewish Coalition in town for their winter meeting. Romney came to talk about foreign policy. But the crowd wanted to ask him about health care — and Romney's responses left him sounding more like a presidential candidate than at any time since his last campaign ended in 2008. http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=17F4FC05-9244-3AB3-4166C2957144F9CA How Healthy Is Your County? A Few Miles Can Make a Big Difference |
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