Monthly Archives: September 2011

Last summer, a 60-year old man died at UMass Memorial Hospital. Apparently, for an hour before the man’s death, alarm bells were ringing indicating that the patient had a fast heart rate and potential breathing problems. But the alarms went unanswered. The incident was only reported to state officials this spring and, according to The [...]

Last week, The Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts think tank, issued a white paper dubiously entitled, “Innovative Medical Liability Reform: Traditional and Non-Traditional Methods,” in an effort to persuade Beacon Hill to adopt tort reform measures that include caps on non-economic damages and protections for medical malpractice insurers that would enable the insurers to pay out [...]

The headlines are hard to reconcile. This week, the journal Health Affairs published an article showing that American doctors are paid more per service – in some cases double! – than any of their foreign counterparts. American primary care physicians are paid approximately seventy percent more per office visit than doctors in other developed countries. [...]

It’s a familiar theme: Americans spend the most on health care, and often get the least in return. Last December, I blogged about how we spend the most per patient on dialysis treatment and have the world’s highest dialysis mortality rate. Now, from medicalcodingandbillingcertification.net, comes a new infograph that sets out how our hospitals are [...]