Category Archives: Health Care Economics
Corporate primary care grows fast
Bellin Health, a large health care provider in Green Bay, WIsconsin, has become a major innovator in the delivery of convenient and cost effective primary care. It partnered five years ago with ShopKo, a Green Bay-based department store chain, to … Read the rest
Hospital admissions dropping
Stay healthy, Save millions! That’s the mantra of many large corporations as they move into aggressive prevention, wellness and chronic disease management programs, often through on-site clinics. But how do you measure success? At Serigraph, we decided to take a … Read the rest
Medicare bypasses value
In a continuing search for bundled prices in health care, I stumbled into another one of those inexplicable pieces of public policy: Medicare doesn’t reimburse surgery centers for orthopedic procedures like knee replacements. It reimburses hospitals at much higher rates, … Read the rest
Zen Zone cuts stress, health costs
Wellness has come this far: Promega, a biotechnology tools company in Madison, WI, offers a Zen Zone. This is a place where employees can go on its eco-centric campus to relieve stress through classes in yoga, meditation or reiku therapy. … Read the rest
One way out of political warfare
The question arises often of late in Wisconsin: Is there a way out of the nasty polarization over union rights and benefits? The state’s politicians may be having a good old time hurling rhetorical thunder bolts at each other. They … Read the rest
Company docs cut admissions
Gene Miller, CEO of ModernMed, a young, national concierge doctor company, believes that proactive primary care can cut hospital admissions by 30%. That’s because primary care doctors who serve as the quarterbacks for their patients’ care deal with chronic diseases, … Read the rest
Silver bullets for public budgets
The principal villain in the budget dramas playing out in statehouses across the country and in the nation’s capitol is the unrelenting rise in health care costs. The inability to put a brake to that upward inflationary spiral is squeezing … Read the rest
Triple play for retirement planning
“Convergence” is becoming a hot concept in benefits management. Patrick Cunningham, CEO of a Manning & Napier, a large investment and benefits management company in upstate New York, used the term to describe the coming together of an employee’s financial … Read the rest
Government takeover or market reform?
Greg Bass, a veteran health benefits executive and consultant in Wisconsin, predicts that the health insurance industry will be gutted when ObamaCare kicks in full bore in 2014. “It’s designed to undermine the industry,” he said. Bas, who has … Read the rest
On-site clinics multiply, slash costs
Large corporations in the Milwaukee area and across the country have figured out what QuadMed has figured out over the last 20 years: if you keep people out expensive hospitals, your health costs can be controlled. Just as consumer-driven health … Read the rest
