The Library

Hot Topics: The Business of Healthcare

 

Selected articles

Due to contractual arrangements, access to some articles may be restricted to the Stanford community, and subscribers of the "Library Databases" offered through the GSB Alumni's Lifelong Learning Program. Inclusion below does not imply University endorsement of the ideas expressed.

 

Remote Patient Monitoring Shows Strong Growth. InformationWeek, 1/5/12
Worldwide telemedicine market will grow 18% annually through 2016, according to Berg Insight.
View article

Health care’s future hangs in balance. San Francisco Business Times, 12/30/11
2012 promises to be a year of decision in the health care industry, one of the business niches most dependent on the political landscape and the health of state and federal budgets.
View article

Concierge Medicine: The Doctor Is (Always) In, If You Pay Enough. Knowledge@Wharton, 12/7/11
For anyone who has ever waited days or weeks to see the doctor, concierge medicine sounds appealing.
View article

Whatever Court Rules, Major Changes in Health Care Likely to Last. New York Times, 11/14/11
No matter what the Supreme Court decides about the constitutionality of the federal law adopted last year, health care in America has changed in ways that will not be easily undone.
View article

The Big Idea: How to Solve the Cost Crisis in Health Care. Harvard Business Review, 9/11
U.S. health care costs currently exceed 17% of GDP and continue to rise. Other countries spend less of their GDP on health care but have the same increasing trend.
View article

Health insurance premiums climb faster in 2011. Reuters, 9/27/11
The cost of health insurance continues to climb for companies and workers, with annual family premiums this year growing at a pace triple that of 2010 and outpacing wage increases, according to a survey.
View article

Cuts in Health Care May Undermine Role in Labor Market. New York Times, 8/17/11
Even during months of stubborn unemployment, the health care industry has provided a solid underpinning, reliably adding jobs in an otherwise dismal environment.
View article

Booming Health Economy is Driving New Gold Rush for Innovators and Job Seekers. PWC, 6/8/11
Seventy-six percent of Fortune 50 companies are either in the health industry or have health divisions, according to PwC US.
View article

Medicare Plan for Payments Irks Hospitals. New York Times, 5/30/11
For the first time in its history, Medicare will soon track spending on millions of individual beneficiaries, reward hospitals that hold down costs and penalize those whose patients prove most expensive.
View article

Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care. New York Times, 5/13/11
The nation’s major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care.
View article

Health apps soon will get RockHealth incubator. San Francisco Chronicle, 4/11/11
As a business-development intern at Apple Inc., Halle Tecco noticed that one category of apps looked less healthy than the others: namely, the health apps.
View article

Swiss Experiment Shows Physicians, Consumers Want Significant Compensation To Embrace Coordinated Care. Health Affairs, 3/2011
Policy makers in several industrial countries are seeking to limit the rise in health care cost growth by supporting coordinated or integrated care programs, which differ from most prevailing forms of medical organization in how physicians are paid and how they work in groups.
View article

How Mobile Phones Can Transform Healthcare. HBR, 3/8/11
The mobile phone is a strong contender as a key transforming agent in the future of health and healthcare.
View article

For Tucson Survivors, Health Care Cost Is Concern. New York Times, 2/3/11
Seconds after gunfire erupted outside a supermarket here last month, Randy Gardner, one of those struck during the barrage, said another potential crisis immediately entered his mind.
View article

Health Spending Rose in ’09, but at Low Rate. New York Times, 1/5/11
Total national health spending grew by 4 percent in 2009, the slowest rate of increase in 50 years, as people lost their jobs, lost health insurance and deferred medical care, the federal government reported.
View article

Following the Money, Doctors Ration Care. New York Times, 12/11/10
Unequal access to health care is hardly a new phenomenon in the United States, but the country is moving toward rationing on a scale that is unprecedented here.
View article

How Have Hospital Stocks Delivered Profit This Quarter? Marketwire, 11/12/10
The down economy negatively impacted the Healthcare Hospitals industry, as patients refrained from making costly visits to hospitals. However, companies in the industry have recently been posting profits despite volume being down in some cases.
View article

For Whom Does the Health Insurance Broker Work? New York Times, 9/10/10
Largely tucked away from the view of the general public is an intense debate over the future role of health insurance brokers in the United States.
View article

Why Baby Costs Less Down the Road in Silicon Valley. Bloomberg, 8/20/10
The pricing power of local hospital systems has received scant attention in the search for answers to the nation’s rising medical costs, according to Alain Enthoven, an economist at Stanford University.
View article

States, small-business lobbyists challenge Obama's health care overhaul. Associated Press, 8/5/10
Twenty states and the nation's most influential small business lobby said today a federal court in Florida must hear their challenge to President Barack Obama's health care overhaul because they face imminent harm from its mandates.
View article

High-Risk Patients, States Prepare for New Insurance Rules. PBS Newshour, 7/6/10
Starting this summer, high-risk patients with preexisting conditions will be able to apply for temporary insurance as part of the health care reform law passed in March. Betty Ann Bowser reports on the new program and why some states are opting out.
View transcript

Health Care Stock Review & Outlook - June 2010. Zacks Equity Research, 6/2/10
Industry outlook on selected health related stocks.
View article

Health Insurance Companies Try to Shape Rules. New York Times, 5/15/10
Health insurance companies are lobbying federal and state officials in an effort to ward off strict regulation of premiums and profits under the new health care law.
View article

Can the small family practice be saved. ZDNet, 4/29/10
The New England Journal of Medicine has conducted a sort of time-and-motion study on a small family practice in Philadelphia, showing how much of an internist’s work day is spent on activities that do not generate income.
View article

In Medicine, the Power of No. New York Times, 4/6/10
The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs.
View article

Now Comes the Hard Part. New York Times, 3/25/10
Health care reform, the most ambitious domestic policy initiative of our time, is now law. And already there is talk of how to make it even better.
View article

For Consumers, Clarity on Health Care Changes. New York Times, 3/21/10
American consumers, who spent a year watching Congress scratch and claw over sweeping health care legislation, can now try to figure out what the overhaul would mean for them.
View article

The Price Of Inaction On Health Care. National Journal, 3/13/10
As the final health care votes approach, the Democrats' enduring dream of covering the uninsured rests mostly with Democratic lawmakers more concerned about controlling costs than expanding access.
View article

How Health Reform Could Affect The 'Young Invincibles'. Kaiser Health News, 3/8/10
Critics warn that the low-cost policies would leave young people financially vulnerable and reluctant to seek care. "This would help the insurance companies, but it would not do much to help the individuals insured," says Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
View article

Bills Stalled, Hospitals Fear Rising Unpaid Care. New York Times, 2/8/10
For the nation’s hospitals, at least, the cost of doing nothing in Washington translates into tens of billions of dollars each year in medical bills that go unpaid by patients with little or no insurance.
View article

What About Health Care Costs? Brookings, 1/20/10
Many health experts are rightly skeptical that the current health-care reform legislation will lower spending growth, despite its many promising pilot projects and proposals.
View article

Centrist, and Yet Not Unified. New York Times, 1/19/10
The stunning victory of Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican who will have Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, suggests that public opinion has turned against the proposal.
View article

Health Spending Growth At A Historic Low In 2008. Health Affairs, no.1 (2010)
In 2008, U.S. health care spending growth slowed to 4.4 percent—the slowest rate of growth over the past forty-eight years.
View article

Would Reform Bills Control Costs? A Response To Atul Gawande. Health Affairs, 12/22/09
GSB Prof. Alain Enthoven's response to Atul Gawande's article "Testing , Testing".
View article

Testing, Testing. The New Yorker, 12/14/09
Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.
View article

Health Care Reform: Whatever Happened to Cost Controls? Time, 12/4/09
In a recent letter to Obama, 23 prominent economists identified four provisions that they said "can go a long way toward delivering better health care, and better value, to Americans."
View article

From the Hospital to Bankruptcy Court. New York Times, 11/24/09
Although statistics are elusive, there is a general sense among bankruptcy lawyers and court officials, in Nashville as elsewhere, that the share of personal bankruptcies caused by illness is growing.
View article

Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform. New York Times, 11/15/09
Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.
View article

Democrats Raise Alarms Over Health Bill Costs. New York Times, 11/9/09
As health care legislation moves toward a crucial airing in the Senate, the White House is facing a growing revolt from some Democrats and analysts who say the bills Congress is considering do not fulfill President Obama’s promise to slow the runaway rise in health care spending.
View article

In need of business skills. Financial Times, 11/8/09
With healthcare accounting for about 18 per cent of expenditure in the US and representing sizeable chunks of the economies of other countries, you might expect the industry to feature prominently in business school programmes.
View article

Business leaders' opposition to public health insurance option takes chutzpah. LA Times, 11/1/09
It took more than a little chutzpah for the chief executives of Eastman Kodak and Verizon Wirelesss to go before reporters the other day to denounce a government health insurance plan as being bad for America.
View article

Health plan’s effect on costs may be slight. The Boston Globe, 10/12/09
Despite repeated promises by President Obama and Democratic leaders that their health care overhaul would lower costs, the proposals before Congress would probably not cut overall US health care spending significantly anytime soon, health policy specialists say.
View article

Health Insurance Exchanges: Will They Work? New York Times, 10/5/09
Despite all the disagreement in Washington, every proposal now before Congress to overhaul the nation’s health care system includes creation of an insurance “exchange” — a marketplace that would operate something like a Travelocity Web site for insurance policies.
View article

Big Food vs. Big Insurance. New York Times, 9/9/09
An opinion piece written by Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
View article

Changing Health Care by Steps. New York Times, 9/1/09
Next week, Congress will return to session, and health care, of course, will be at the top of its agenda. Passing a bill, it’s clear, will be no easier than in previous decades.
View article

Are Insurers' Profits As Low As They Claim? NPR, 8/3/09
As the health care overhaul battle moves out of Washington and onto the airways and main streets during the August recess, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade association for the nation's health insurers, is fighting a familiar battle.
View article

Health Bill Clears Hurdle and Hints at Consensus. New York Times, 7/31/09
House members headed home on Friday, leaving behind the outlines of a nearly $1 trillion health care overhaul that is sure to draw fire from a variety of interests, but also shows the beginnings of a consensus that would provide insurance for more Americans and give them new rights in dealing with insurers.
View article

Challenge to Health Bill: Selling Reform. New York Times, 7/21/09
Our health care system is engineered, deliberately or not, to resist change. The people who pay for it — you and I — often don’t realize that they’re paying for it.
View article

Small-Business Support Sought On Health Care. NPR, 7/17/09
Small business is suddenly playing a big role in negotiations over health care. Supporters and opponents of various plans to overhaul the system are all trying to paint themselves as champions of mom and pop entrepreneurs.
View article

Health Care Rationing Rhetoric Overlooks Reality. New York Times, 7/17/09
The r-word has become a rejoinder to anyone who says that this country must reduce its runaway health spending, especially anyone who favors cutting back on treatments that don’t have scientific evidence behind them.
View article

5 Questions: Fuchs on federal health insurer. Stanford Medical Center Report, 06/17/09
For many Democrats, the key issue in health-care reform is the creation of a government health insurance program to compete with the private sector. Stanford's Victor Fuchs, a leading health economist, is skeptical of the idea. Paul Costello, executive director of the medical school's communications office, spoke with him for a podcast in the "1:2:1" program.
View transcript (with podcast)

What's a public health plan anyway? CNNMoney, 6/9/09
Details are sparse and consensus is far off, but the debate is on. Here's a look at some ideas being floated.
View article

Salvaging U.S. Health Care. Stanford Business Magazine, 5/2008
Everyone agrees the U.S. system needs resuscitation, but reform is an elusive goal.
View article
 

Selected Videos

 

Alan Garber, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Health Policy and of the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research at Stanford University, discusses the importance of distinguishing between a treatment's effectiveness and its value, and in turn what role evidence-based medicine should play in today's coverage decisions.

 

Bruce Bodaken, CEO and Chairman of Blue Shield, discusses what he thinks leaders must do in order to finally make health care reform a reality.

 

 

 

Page updated by: Nora Richardson

 

 

• Back to Top