Healthcare Matters

Lots of waste.

Report: About 30 cents of every health care dollar wasted; US can cut costs without rationing

WASHINGTON — The U.S. health care system squanders $750 billion a year — roughly 30 cents of every medical dollar — through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork, fraud and other waste, the influential Institute of Medicine said Thursday in a report that ties directly into the presidential campaign…

Drink to your health?

Drink To Your Heart’s Content — If It’s Nonalcoholic

Wine lovers, get ready for a buzz kill. A new study has found that drinking two glasses of red wine a day can help lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease — but only if the alcohol has been removed…

A big mover and shaker.

How A $440,000 Drug Is Turning Alexion Into Biotech’s New Innovation Powerhouse

The pharmaceutical business is not kind to entrepreneurs. It takes more than a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to get from cool idea to marketed drug, which is why the founders of Amgen, Genentech and Gilead were gone by the time those companies became big successes…

From Spend Matters

Friday Rant: Post Vacation Rust — Get Back in the Game With Mental and Workplace Tricks

After returning from vacation, I’m always reminded about how quickly the mind degrades in just a couple weeks away from the usual grind. Tasks that used to take fifteen minutes can take twice the time or more. Do we just forget the shortcuts that we subliminally employ to get things done quickly and multi-task? Anyway, the loss of speed isn’t what concerns me alone. It’s what it takes to stay mentally in the game once returning consistently. Which really — at least for me — is the ability to constantly synthesize information from a diverse set of sources, including peers, newsfeeds, our internal data, benchmarks, etc…

From Spend Matters UK/Europe

At some point, something has to give… debt, deficit and a confused populace

What is really scary is that only 10% of the a sample survey in the UK knew that the coalition government is actually going to add £600 billion to the national debt over this Parliament. Almost 50% of the sample thinks the coalition will reduce debt by £600 Billion. So they’re only £1.2 Trillion out in their understanding of the country’s financial position – that’s around £20,000 per person in the UK. Truly scary…