By Tom Ulrich
Blog
Should we tax healthcare insurance as income?
Health care insurance benefits have been excluded from taxable income since 1943, when the National War Labor Board ruled employers, who were offering health plans as a way to attract workers without violating wartime wage-and-price controls, could deduct their cost as an expense without reporting their value as income for workers. As a result, employees get the benefit of the insurance without paying taxes on its value.
When experts speak outside guidelines
Security audit kickoff
Meaningful Use Stage 2 requires a security audit.
"Conduct or review a security risk analysis in accordance with the requirements under 45 CFR 164.308(a)(1), including addressing the encryption/security of data at rest in accordance with requirements under 45 CFR 164.312 (a)(2)(iv) and 45 CFR 164.306(d)(3), and implement security updates as necessary and correct identified security deficiencies as part of the provider’s risk management process."
FDA urged to develop security plan for wireless implantable medical devices
By Stewart Eisenhart, Emergo Group
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued recommendations that the Food and Drug Administration develop a comprehensive plan to improve the agency’s ability to review and monitor active implantable medical devices that rely on wireless and other advanced technologies.
Mobile devices for medical education
Today I’m doing a video teleconference keynote to a group in Thailand to discuss the use of mobile devices in medical education at Harvard.
Here are the slides I’ll use. Thanks to Jason Alvarez at HMS for preparing the data.
Medtech hacking: Ask me anything
In the spirit of President Barack Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” session on popular Internet forum Reddit, I’m opening up the proverbial phone lines ahead of next week’s AdvaMed 2012 conference and medtech hacking presentation to solicit any and all questions our readers might have about medical device software threats and security.
On the promotion of hospital-based killing
It’s an interesting world in medicine these days. What I read in papers and see in flashy professionally-produced book trailers about hospitals as killing fields boggles the mind. Imagine: there are even full page spreads in papers as influential as the Wall Street Journal carrying headlines like "How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us."
French spoken here : Why you should attend AdvaMed 2012
We had all been reading, the French couple and I, on the three-hour flight back to Boston from Fort Lauderdale. She sat in the window seat with a newspaper, he read from a Kindle, and I fidgeted in the aisle seat, slogging through a slim but dense volume on ancient history. (The problem with being a writer is that you don’t read books; you read sentences, and it slows things down considerably.)
As we began our descent, the flight attendant came by and asked the gentleman to turn off his Kindle. When he didn’t hear her, she leaned over and gently but firmly told him to power down.
Why patients don’t report medical errors
by Marshall Allen, ProPublica
Why aren’t healthcare prices ever on the table?
Journalist-turned investment banker-turned auto bailout czar Steven Rattner provocatively calls for “not quite” death panels in an op-ed in today’s New York Times. Noting a quarter of all Medicare spending comes in the last year of life, he writes: