David Williams

Last week's arrest of a French doctor for leaking information about a clinical trial to a hedge fund is disturbing, but the alleged activity is neither new nor particularly rare.

Deval Patrick's first term as Massachusetts governor was somewhat disappointing from a health care perspective, especially the first couple years. That's when the Executive Branch tried hard to squander the state's lead in health information technology implementation by dithering over productive spending of funds allocated for e-health and wasting time and money on consulting fees instead.

Among the many compromises in the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act (PPACA) is the prohibition against using quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) for coverage, reimbursement or incentive programs. The idea, presumably, is to repel the suggestion that PPACA enables "rationing" or death panels.

Grand Junction, Colorado is touted as a low cost, high performance health care market. A New England Journal of Medicine Perspective (Low-Cost Lessons from Grand Junction, Colorado) provides seven reasons for this success.

Rationing is a very dirty word in America, evoking grim images of wartime Great Britain and - in the health care context - withholding of needed care from patients based on cost. But cut back on costs we must, and with magical thinking about the deficit becoming every more popular, we'll have to find other ways to convince folks to do it.

Some of the first significant elements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) go into effect today, and a number of articles provide details of the changes.

Kaiser Family Foundation just issued a useful brief on the uninsured, which is a good, data-driven summary about the roughly 50 million people in that category in the US as of 2009.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is implementing an interesting method to highlight out-of-network costs and to reduce them.