In Case You Missed It — Healthcare Daily Digest for Friday, 11 January

Up top, we’re looking at this piece from Minnesota’s KARE 11 News: “Healthcare, school finance top lawmaker wish list.” Mostly because it’s part of a fascinating legislative narrative regarding how each state is finding its way towards implementing the Affordable Care Act.

The other reason I’m linking to it is this sort of sad realization by Minnesota Sen. Minority Leader David Hann of Eden Prairie: “We realize the President was reelected and that they’re going to go ahead with this health system.”

Hann then follows it up with this: “We, as a minority caucus, want to make sure that under the circumstances we will do everything that we can to protect the private sector market place, to protect the private health providers.”

Because sure. Because in the balance of things, Private Sector Market Places > human beings. (I know, I know: “Go play another Indigo Girls album, Mike Bevel. Don’t you realize that private sector market places employ those human beings? And that if you muck up that delicate balance, you have an industry that can’t afford to employ humans? How long have you been a Communist, Mike Bevel? HOW LONG?”)

(Oh, and referencing another part of that article: all-day kindergarten is just…day care, right? There’s a lot of rhetoric in the later quotes about “early childhood learning is that important” and “commitment to quality education” but kindergarteners have, like, fifteen seconds tops in their Attention Span Bank. This isn’t going to be whatevermany hours of education, is it? And maybe now’s a good time to share: Mike Bevel has no, and will have no, children. He does, however, live with three cats.)

Let’s see what else I’ve found for you:

• Like Pac-Man, But With Healthcare!: Acadia Healthcare Is Gobbling Up Assets And Moving Up The Charts proclaims this headline from Forbes.com. “Shares of Acadia Healthcare reached a 52-week high of $25.76 on January 8 following its accretive acquisition of Greenleaf Center a day earlier. Several strategic investments of late and impressive fiscal third-quarter results helped this health care services provider become a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).”

• Metaphors That Confuse: “The 31st annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, happening this week in San Francisco, has become the Burning Man of biotechnology.” I… don’t know what that means. No, not the biotechnology part — I work with nerds; I’ve got that covered. But the rest: that A is the blank of B set-up that doesn’t get me any closer to the point. I guess what Forbes contributor Joon Yun, M.D., is trying to say is: too many naked people and one guy’s going to the hospital for eating too many mushrooms.

• Death Comes for Us All, Mary Alice: “While the US spends more on healthcare than any other developed nation, it also has one of the lowest life expectancies: People living in the US die sooner, get sicker and sustain more injuries than those in other high-income countries.” Or, in other words: the U.S. is the Somalia of the rich countries, according to RT.com story, “Costly healthcare can’t keep mortality rates down.”