US Healthcare
- Health-care fraud : Why thieves love America’s health-care system (Economist)
- How complex are health regulations? If the rules were simpler, defrauding Medicare would be harder (Economist)
- Health-care fraud in America : That’s where the money is. How to hand over $272 billion a year to criminals (Economist)
"Crooks love American health care for two reasons. First, as Willie Sutton said of banks, it’s where the money is—no other country spends nearly as much on pills and procedures. Second, unlike a bank, it is barely guarded.Some scams are simple. Patients claim benefits to which they are not entitled; suppliers charge Medicaid for non-existent services.Dr Berwick’s study found that administrative complexity and unnecessary treatment waste even more health dollars than fraud does. Perhaps that is the real crime."
Privacy & Security
"Surveillance is the advertising industry’s new business model.By monitoring the websites people visit, these companies can infer their location, income, family size, education, age, employment and much more.Most consumers have no idea how closely they are being followed online. They have no notion that on the most popular websites up to 1,300 companies are watching what they do.
Such information could be used against consumers. Someone who is categorised by a data broker as a “motorcycle enthusiast” might find his rates for medical or accident insurance rise. “Men in trouble” might find it harder to get a job.
People should be able to find out if they are being tracked and what information companies are holding about them, and they should be able to stop companies tracking them if they want. America has relied on the industry to regulate itself, but it has done too little to protect people’s privacy."
Philanthropy 2.0
Science, Medicine & Technology + Government & Policy + Social Change + Economics
"TEN years ago the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had identified 14 “grand challenges” in the field—from “preparing vaccines that do not require refrigeration” to “developing a genetic strategy to deplete or incapacitate a disease-transmitting insect population”—and had invited suggestions from the world’s scientists for specific projects of a sort that might not otherwise get funded, which might meet these goals.Mr and Mrs Gates used this week’s meeting to announce a new set of challenges, this time spreading the net wider than the strictly science-based suggestions the programme has encouraged until now."
"... this time the foundation is not going it alone. All sorts of partners, from America’s foreign-aid agency to the governments of Brazil, Canada, India and South Africa, are being recruited.
.... public health depends on educating people and persuading them to change their behaviour, as well as on having the right medicines, as the example of HIV and AIDS eloquently shows. That sort of approach requires social change as well as appropriate technology."
It's great to see
- Government & Policy and
- Social Change
getting into the equation besides Scientific, Medical and Technological solutions and Economics.
On Philanthropy 2.0
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