Health Wonk Review: Back to School Daze

Ah Labor Day! A final blush of summer before jumping back to work and into the school year. Here’s a pretty serious set of posts as you settle back in to the fall routine. The opioid epidemic Managed Care Matters tells tales from the front lines of the opioid epidemic. Not pretty. Not pretty at all. Health Affairs Blog shares insights on the development of a “safe space and medical monitoring to prevent overdose deaths” in Boston. This excellent post describes the observation and treatment facility (which is not a supervised injection facility) and lays out five policy lessons learned to date. Insurance and the Affordable Care Act? The Obamacare insurance exchanges are in somewhat rough shape, but as Wright on Health explains, there are some pretty straightforward fixes. Politics (as usual) is likely to get in the way. If you were somehow under the illusion that Health Care Renewal was a fan of managed care mergers (and for-profit, managed care companies in general) this week’s post should erase any doubt. In fact, it’s a trip down memory lane from the early 1990s formation of Aetna and its merger with US Healthcare to today’s politically motivated withdrawal from the exchanges to retaliate for the government’s opposition to a new mega-merger. Oh boy. Insurance is about spreading risk, but you have to be pretty darn to big to spread around the expense of a $1 million/month chronically ill patient. That’s what Wellmark is havi...
Source: Health Business Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Blogs Uncategorized Source Type: blogs