In the past ten years we have experienced an Internet bubble, a Housing bubble, and Financial Markets Bubble. What is the next bubble to burst.
Could it be a health care bubble?
George Lundberg in a recent post on The Health Care Blog enumerates on the development of bubbles in real estate, silicone valley, financial markets, and presents a scary prediction of what may very well occur in health care. Some experts predict a sixty percent (60%) adjustment in overall health care expenditures as compared to the present portion healthcare consumes (or adds) to the GDP.
Trimming Health Care Costs
There is a movement afoot to nominate George Lundberg for Surgeon General. For those of you who wish to support this movement, you can go to the Web Site to sign the petition.
While we are on the topic if influential people for the Obama administration and their ties to the administration, here are some interesting facts for your evening game of Trivial pursuit.
What highly placed official at the NIH (National Institutes of Health is related to a key player in the White House?
Answer: Ezekiel Emmanuel, MD is the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Barak Obama's Chief of Staff.
Another key figure in Health Care Reform, and it's impact on the Federal budet is Peter Orzsag.
Mr. Orzsag holds a cabinet positon as Director of the Office of Management of the Budget (OMB).
Mr Orzsag is presented as the 'ultimate nerd' combined with political savy. He has a keen interest in health care economics, health care reform, and brings key analytical tools merged with knowledge of how to apply it to the political process.
His animating passions are far grander — health care, energy policy and Social Security overhaul, for starters.
Soon he will focus more closely on health care, his central policy obsession. In recent years, many say, he has helped popularize the idea that reducing health care costs is essential to the country’s economic future and the sustainability of the federal budget.
To address the problem, he wants to do no less than change the way medicine is practiced, eliminating unnecessary tests and unproven treatments in favor of what he calls a higher-value approach that he says will actually improve health. But no one quite knows how much money such measures would save, and Republicans already accuse him of trying to limit care
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