Mid-week Miscellany

Business Insurance reports that "In 2011, total U.S. health care spending hit $2.701 trillion, or $8,680 per person. While this is a record, expenditures rose only 3.9% in 2011, unchanged from 2010 and 2009, according to statistics compiled by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and published in the journal Health Affairs."  The Wall Street Journal reports that health care costs are poised to jump again as people get back to work and Obamacare becomes unleashed.  The Healthcare Cost Institute, a group of large health insurers with a huge claims database, has released new charts on how we spend our health care dollars.

HHS today trumpeted the growth of accountable care organizations in Medicare. Accountable care organizations are an approach to coordinating care under which the providers assume financial risk.  The AMA News reports on a recent Commonwealth Fund study finding that becoming an ACO is easier said than done.

The AMA News also reports on the provider community's now quixotic (in the FEHBlog's view) campaign to prevent the scheduled implementation of the ICD-10 code set in 2014. The FEHBlog is sympathetic to this campaign. The ICD-10 upgrade that HHS has mandated under HIPAA will not improve the claims process a whit. Public health groups have advocated the change because the ICD-10 gives much more detailed diagnostic coding information that the ICD-9. But the idea of HIPAA was to improve electronic claims processing, not public health.

And since this entry is supposed to include miscellany, let's end with a Kaiser Health News article about how doctors, dentists, and allied health professionals are resorting to Groupon and other social media sales techniques to hawk their services. Hippocrates must be rolling in his grave.