The mayor announced a deal for California Pacific Medical Center construction, the largest private hospital construction project in San Francisco history, with great fanfare. The big winners are the landlords and speculators. The centerpiece of this goes to one of the biggest issues in this crowded city: Jobs and housing costs. The mayor talks about jobs all the time—he's the "jobs mayor, jobs jobs jobs." Which is popular when unemployment remains stubbornly high. But there's a flip side: If you create a lot of jobs that attract new residents to the city, and you don't build housing that's affordable to those workers, you put additional pressure on the existing housing stock, driving up costs for everyone.
Screening longtime tobacco users for lung cancer would be less costly than the widely accepted practice of screening for breast, cervical and colorectal cancers and would reduce the death toll of lung cancer by an estimated 15,000 lives a year, according to a study released Monday that is likely to ignite debate on expanding healthcare coverage for smokers. A group of actuarial economists calculated that annual low-dose CT scans of middle-aged Americans who have smoked the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every day for 30 years would cost each insured American an extra 76 cents a month. That investment could give each person whose lung cancer was caught early an extra year of life, at a cost of $18,862 per patient.
The son of a Brooklyn baker, Dr. David M. Eisenberg, an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, is the founder and chief officiant of "Healthy Kitchens/Healthy Lives," an "'interfaith marriage," as he calls it, among physicians, public health researchers and distinguished chefs that seeks to tear down the firewall between "healthy" and "crave-able" cuisine. Although physicians are on the front lines of the nation's diabetes and obesity crises, many graduate from medical school with little knowledge of nutrition, let alone cooking. It is a deficiency that is becoming increasingly apparent as the grim statistics climb.
A typical hospital with 200 to 300 beds wastes up to $3.8 million a year, or 9.6 percent of its total budget, on readmissions of patients who shouldn't have had to come back, says Premier, a healthcare company that advises hospitals on improving efficiency and safety. The company analyzed the records of 5.8 million incidents in which a patient went back to a hospital to be re-treated and found they added $8.7 billion a year, or 15.7 percent, to the cost of caring for those people. Cutting back on these readmissions would be good news for patients. Even if the hospital has to eat the costs of additional treatments, patients are still subject to the risks of the procedures they undergo and the normal danger of contracting an infection while in the hospital.
The Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president's healthcare law. The money is only part of the IRS's total implementation spending, and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process. The tax agency is responsible for several key provisions of the new law, including the unpopular individual mandate. Republican lawmakers have tried to cut off funding to implement the healthcare law, at least until after the Supreme Court decides whether to strike it down. That ruling is expected by June, and oral arguments last week indicated the justices might well overturn at least the individual mandate, if not the whole law.
President Obama's landmark healthcare initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation's budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing. The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the healthcare law will reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.