Some US employees still enjoy Cadillac-style health plans in which little is paid out of pocket and coverage includes almost every health need, but health care costs for its workers helped send Cadillac maker General Motors into bankruptcy. Moreover, for every worker or family with a Cadillac plan, there’s a family with big deductibles, limited

These are challenging days to be a radiologist. Decreasing payment, financial uncertainties, market consolidation of imaging facilities, utilization controls, disrupted business plans, questionable business models, and turf and contract challenges have become commonplace concerns for radiology practices. Added to these issues are equally valid

In many imaging offices, the reception staff is coached and scripted, and its members might even engage in role-playing exercises in order to create the best experience for patients.

A modest 10% optimization of health care’s administrative processes would save the US health care system $500 billion over 10 years. That is the estimate of the Healthcare Administrative Simplification Coalition (HASC), which sponsored a Summit on Administrative Complexity in Washington, DC, on November 13, 2008, and issued a report¹ based on the

Harvard professor, best-selling business author, and management consultant specializing in competitive advantage Michael E. Porter, PhD, offers his free-market spin on health care reform¹ in the July 8, 2009, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. He begins by rightly noting that decades of debate and fragmentary reform have resulted in no

Think of the current economic crisis in terms of an acute myocardial infarction. The patient is rushed to the hospital, where he is stabilized and recanalized, but it is not over (it is never over), as thoughts turn to preventing the next attack and the patient initiates a lifetime gambit to alter lifestyle patterns. This is the premise of Heifetz

As you read this, health care reform (at least the idea that a single, transformative bill will markedly and permanently reduce the problem of the uninsured in this country) is still an active prospect, and one to which the president and, quite independently, leaders in Congress have committed enormous political capital. While the importance of

During August, the health care debate moved from the marble edifices of Washington, DC, to the highways and byways of US life. To this point, many thoughtful people have been engaged in this discussion, and interesting ideas are being proposed from all sectors of public life. This wider public forum may not be particularly well suited to parsing