Lynch Ryan's weblog about workers' compensation, risk management, business insurance, workplace health & safety, occupational medicine, injured workers, insurance webtools & technology and related topics

August 25, 2008

Quo Vadis Alabama?

It was only a matter of time before the perfect storm hit state employee healthcare. It happened this week, on August 20, in, of all places, Alabama. By 2011, Alabama employees who are obese, hypertensive, or have high cholesterol or high blood glucose will have to pay $25 more each month for their state health insurance. In 2010, they’ll pay...
Posted by Tom Lynch at 6:58 AM Link to, Comment (3), or E-mail this post
March 19, 2008

The Best Health Care in the World - Part Four: Do the Statistics Tell the Whole Truth?

We have seen that America spends more on health care than other developed democracies around the world for outcomes that, on the whole, are no better than those achieved by the average OECD country. Our health care "system" perpetuates ever-increasing spending without delivering results to justify the expense. Moreover, because of our country's isolation, both geographically and culturally, few Americans...
Posted by Tom Lynch at 5:42 AM Link to, Comment (3), or E-mail this post
March 17, 2008

The Best Health Care in the World - Part Three: What Do We Get for the Money?

In Part One of this series, we began looking at some of the many cost disparities between group health and workers' compensation. In Part Two, we compared US health care costs with costs in the other 29 member-countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). OECD countries, all democracies, are considered the most economically advanced in the world....
Posted by Tom Lynch at 8:22 AM Link to, Comment (1), or E-mail this post
March 13, 2008

The Best Health Care in the World: Part Two - What does it cost?

In 1992 I became a Trustee of a major, tertiary care, teaching hospital in Massachusetts. For Trustee indoctrination, new Trustees spent a week in a classroom learning about every facet of hospital life. One morning we were briefed by the hospital's CFO. I was astonished to learn that the hospital had 27 different billing systems, one for each insurer and...
Posted by Tom Lynch at 8:28 AM Link to, Comment (1), or E-mail this post