Health Care Reform Articles - July 3, 2011

Managed care enters the exam room as insurers buy doctors groups

By Christopher Weaver, Kaiser Health News, Published: July 1

Even if UnitedHealth Group isn’t your insurance company, there’s a good chance it touches you in some way. The $100 billion behemoth sells technology to hospitals and other insurers, distributes drugs, manages clinical trials and offers continuing medical education, among other things, through the growing web of firms it owns.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/insurers-quietly-gaining-control-of-doctors-covered-by-companies-plans/2011/06/29/AG5DNftH_print.html

More employers are offering on-site medical clinics

The cost-cutting strategy has been embraced by dozens of companies — typically large employers that are self-insured and pay their own medical claims.

By Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times
July 3, 2011

advertisement

Major employers across the country, eager to curb fast-rising healthcare costs, are opening their own state-of-the-art health centers where doctors and nurses provide medical care to workers often just steps from their desks.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-company-clinics-20110703,0,119799,print.story

In his 1984 book, "The Social Transformation of American Medicine", Paul Starr observed that while American doctors spent most of the 20th century fearing a government takeover of medicine and successfully fighting it off, the real threat to their autonomy was the corporations.  The two stories above validate his prediction, and seem to indicate the the corporate takeover of American medicine is in full swing.  American doctors have made a Faustian bargain - high incomes (for most but not all of them) in exchange for their professional autonomy!


I think many of them are beginning to think they came out on the short end of the deal.  But it may be too late to undo the damage.


-SPC

U.S. healthcare spending far outpaces other countries

By Noam N. Levey, Washington Bureau / For the Booster Shots blog

June 30, 2011, 11:47 a.m.

Washington— 

Spending on healthcare in the United States continued to far outpace other industrialized countries in 2009, according to a new tally by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Healthcare spending in the U.S. accounted for 17.4% of the nation’s total economic output, nearly twice the average of 34 OECD countries, the OECD found.

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-health-spending-20110630,0,4003574.story