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Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader

I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using <a href="http://reader.google.com/">Google Reader</a>, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations. Since then, Reader has launched several <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/07/following-liking-and-people-searching.html">sharing features</a> that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of <a href="http://www.google.com/googlereader/powerreaders2/index.html#">Power Readers</a>. In this edition, we've expanded from <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/follow-what-obama-mccain-and-leading.html">Power Readers in Politics</a> to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader. Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_Huffington">Arianna Huffington</a> go to get different perspectives on the news? When <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman">Paul Krugman</a> surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit <a href="http://www.google.com/googlereader/powerreaders2/index.html#">www.google.com/powerreaders</a> to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyWTgEut1v5QI0-peKZZRdkUPtmWX-TPAxONsHmWUSZX6URQCWJkq95qFPSIy5CsAkd_pejYXQeSuBKK5bDM3hmEV9lWYVsZK4AzA8TXVoeXYTg-Ujltr9qyG9EVUclDvepiMreWGqE5aJ/s1600-h/powerreaders.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373998249780833634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyWTgEut1v5QI0-peKZZRdkUPtmWX-TPAxONsHmWUSZX6URQCWJkq95qFPSIy5CsAkd_pejYXQeSuBKK5bDM3hmEV9lWYVsZK4AzA8TXVoeXYTg-Ujltr9qyG9EVUclDvepiMreWGqE5aJ/s400/powerreaders.png" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 259px;" /></a>A big thanks to all of the contributors who shared their reading lists with us. Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader

I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using Google Reader , but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Ov...

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In the future, everyone will monetize their 15 minutes

(Cross-posted from the <a href="http://ytbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-future-everyone-will-monetize-their.html">YouTube Biz Blog</a>) We <a href="http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2007/12/partner-program-expands.html">first launched</a> the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/fred">Fred</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/valsartdiary">ValsArtDiary</a> — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM">Battle of Kruger</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs">David after dentist</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno">Otters holding hands</a>. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time. We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account: <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0xqC-mD19oVhI5eFU62QcKG-QyTfKVftFCFimoMldkPP-YIgjsgWBr52OrTyXY0Qlua8OJ7NExV8k6NGo9Vv0Jglcv8oe5JsrR238uuhDedLWlRkeDCOL7BhK-0eyd5lwgx2T0CFvi-eP/s1600-h/YTMonetization.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373948130484086898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0xqC-mD19oVhI5eFU62QcKG-QyTfKVftFCFimoMldkPP-YIgjsgWBr52OrTyXY0Qlua8OJ7NExV8k6NGo9Vv0Jglcv8oe5JsrR238uuhDedLWlRkeDCOL7BhK-0eyd5lwgx2T0CFvi-eP/s400/YTMonetization.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 160px;" /></a> Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your <a href="http://www.google.com/adsense">Google AdSense</a> account each month. (If you don't have an AdSense account, you'll have the opportunity to create one.) Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/partners">apply to be a member</a> of the YPP. We'll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon. It's taken us some time to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the YPP to so many individual users and videos. Now that we're ready to share these opportunities with a wider audience, we're excited to see how individual video partnerships will help even more people make money from their success on YouTube. Posted by Shenaz Zack, Product Manager

In the future, everyone will monetize their 15 minutes

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog ) We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users ma...

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The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data

This post is the latest in an ongoing <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-we-help-track-flu-trends.html">series</a> about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed. What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere. If you use <a href="http://www.google.com/mobile/products/maps.html">Google Maps for mobile</a> with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with <a href="http://www.google.com/mobile/gmm/mylocation/index.html">My Location</a>, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-qXddE05UTfYPov7sSX0DE7xKCi9UpLrhx-ge43mxq2kk0RWM9eACvwlPPZWdHPXTrn8ZyZxKUAS2DC4EvuC1q0KEfFWj5G0aqKYWuZW8iLaZRq4YGAV39zj84WJe1O4_HgCUXBnMav1q/s1600-h/gmm_arterials_z15.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373770641888093074" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-qXddE05UTfYPov7sSX0DE7xKCi9UpLrhx-ge43mxq2kk0RWM9eACvwlPPZWdHPXTrn8ZyZxKUAS2DC4EvuC1q0KEfFWj5G0aqKYWuZW8iLaZRq4YGAV39zj84WJe1O4_HgCUXBnMav1q/s400/gmm_arterials_z15.png" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 267px;" /></a> This week we're<a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/08/arterial-traffic-available-on-google.html"> expanding our traffic layer</a> to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous). We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is <a href="http://www.google.com/mobile/default/maps.html">free</a> and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better. We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions <a href="http://support.google.com/gmm/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81875">here</a>. We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you. Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps

The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. -...

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H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations

A somewhat remarkable new book will be released in Nov. 2009 by the American Health Information Management Association (<a href="http://www.ahima.org/">AHIMA</a>), of which I am an associate editor. It is aimed largely at IT and healthcare management personnel who are not knowledgeable in Medical Informatics. I express thanks to AHIMA for their forward thinking in accepting and publishing this material. Books such as this were difficult to get into print just a few years ago, likely due to resistance to their publication by the powerful trade organizations of the health IT vendors: <blockquote><a href="https://www.ahimastore.org/ProductDetailBooks.aspx?ProductID=14181">H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations</a> In H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations, the editors—all of whom have led successful electronic health record (EHR) and Health Information Technology (HIT) projects—have collected case studies of HIT implementations that didn't go as planned, offering expert insight into key obstacles that must be overcome to leverage IT and modernize and transform healthcare. ... the adoption of effective HIT—now a national priority with the passing of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)—remains at a fairly primitive stage compared with IT adoption in every other major industry. In fact, healthcare is the only trillion dollar industry that remains primarily in the paper stage, even though most healthcare data are available electronically. By studying HIT implementations that failed, the editors are able to document, catalogue, and share key lessons that all project managers of HIT, health system leaders in informatics and technology, hospital executives, policy makers, and service and technology providers must learn in order to succeed with HIT. H.I.T. or Miss presents a model to discuss HIT failures in a safe and protected manner, providing an opportunity to focus on the lessons offered by a failed initiative as opposed to worrying about potential retribution for exposing a project as having failed. Authors The editor and associate editors all served on the 2007 leadership board of the Clinical Information Systems Working Group of the American Medical informatics Association (AMIA). Editor: Jonathan Leviss, MD Associate Editors: Brian Gugerty, DNS, MS, RN Bonnie Kaplan, PhD Gail Keenan, PhD, RN Jonathan Leviss, MD Larry Ozeran, MD Eric Rose, MD Scot Silverstein, MD </blockquote> This book follows the anonymized case study approach I used in my <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/medinfo.htm">website on HIT difficulties</a>, started in 1999, itself based loosely on the style of the introduction of the 1994 book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Technological-Change-Organizational-Informatics/dp/0387985484">Managing Technological Change: Organizational Issues in Healthcare Informatics</a>" (ed. 1) by sociotechnical issues pioneers informaticists Nancy Lorenzi and Robert Riley. One can talk about "healthcare transformation" via HIT all one wants, but until the current inadequate approaches to HIT (per the <a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12572">National Research Council, 2009</a>) are themselves transformed, doing so is largely wide-eyed utopianism. I am quite pleased to see this new book appear. (Note: I will not receive any royalties for sales). -- SS

H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Implementations

A somewhat remarkable new book will be released in Nov. 2009 by the American Health Information Management Association ( AHIMA ), of which I...

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NY Mayor: Pharmaceutical Executives "Don't Make a Lot of Money"

We just posted about the onrush of people into health care management, including many with little knowledge of or experience in health care. <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iIDQ_Nf9xpv7MZj2NNu9PsxfAAxwD9A7DOKO2">According to the Associated Press</a>, one prominent politician defended at least pharmaceutical company managers who "don't make a lot of money." [Warning, irony and sarcasm ahead.] <blockquote> Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies and their chief executives on Friday, declaring that they 'don't make a lot of money' and shouldn't be scapegoats in the health care debate. The mayor — and wealthiest person in New York City with a fortune estimated at $16.5 billion — made the comments on his radio show Friday during a discussion about health care. "You know, last time I checked, pharmaceutical companies don't make a lot of money, their executives don't make a lot of money — not that they couldn't be better," Bloomberg said. The mayor, a Republican-turned-independent who already has spent more than $36 million on his re-election campaign this year, often battles criticism that he is out of touch with regular people. He built his fortune after founding the financial information company that bears his name. Earlier this year he declared "we love the rich people" while arguing against raising taxes on the wealthy, and said recently that President Barack Obama, who earns $400,000 a year and has made millions from book sales, "doesn't get paid that much" and is "on a budget" like millions of Americans. </blockquote> In its article on the Mayor's health care wisdom, the NY Daily News noted, <blockquote> The highest-paid drug executive last year, Johnson & Johnson CEO Bill Weldon, took home a reported $29.4 million after his company raked in $63.7 billion. </blockquote> The Associated Press article also commented, <blockquote> Pharmaceutical CEOs are known to make millions, with generous salaries, stock options and other perks. Abbott Laboratories Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Miles White's compensation was $25.3 million in 2008. The North Chicago, Ill.-based company saw profit rising 35 percent to $4.88 billion. Merck & Co.'s chief executive, Richard T. Clark, received a $17.3 million compensation package for 2008. The company's profit more than doubled to $7.8 billion. </blockquote> Later, <blockquote> It was clear that Bloomberg or one of his aides realized his gaffe while he was still on the air Friday. The mayor, who has sought to cast himself as a financial and business expert, came back from a break and said he had looked up the pay of some pharmaceutical executives. 'Some of them are making a decent amount, more than a decent amount of money,' he said. Either way, Bloomberg said, it doesn't solve anything to beat up on pharmaceutical companies while trying to come up with health care solutions. </blockquote> We have previously posted about the notion that the US and the rest of the world is increasingly run by members of the "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/superclass">superclass</a>," whose disconnection from the realities of daily life, including the US dysfunctional health care is likely to translate into little real support by the powers that be for meaningful health care reform. Mayor Bloomberg's wealth and political power would qualify him for superclass membership. His notion that multi-million dollar a year pharmaceutical imperial CEOs ought to be pitied for their paltry incomes suggests not only that the very rich are unlike you and me, but that meaningful health care reform is unlikely as long as we allow ourselves to be lead by people so insulated from the vicissitudes of daily life.

NY Mayor: Pharmaceutical Executives "Don't Make a Lot of Money"

We just posted about the onrush of people into health care management, including many with little knowledge of or experience in health care....

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NY Times Proclaims Anyone Can Run a Health Care Organization "with a Little Studying Up"

Last week, the NY Times published a somewhat breathless <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/education/20HEALTH.html">article</a> on the wonderful opportunities available in health care management. Health care management seems to be the one area that is growing during the "great recession." <blockquote>Health care may be a costly drag on the economy, but it’s still a great place to find a job. Midcareer managers and other workers have been migrating to health care jobs for years, of course. Now, with the recession, the lure is even stronger. </blockquote> The article suggested managing health care organizations does not require knowing much about health care. <blockquote> 'The demand for talented leaders in health care is only going to go up,' predicted Jane Groves, a senior vice president at Integrated Healthcare Strategies, an executive search and consulting firm in Kansas City, Mo. 'All that demand can’t and shouldn’t be filled by people already working in health care.' </blockquote> The article supplied success stories of health care managers who came from unrelated fields, without any actual experience giving care, or knowledge of biomedicine. For example, <blockquote> Frank Pinkowsky worked as a manager at DuPont for 24 years before taking a position as senior vice president for human resources at the Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, Pa. 'Don’t underestimate the value of what you learned working for someone else,' he advised. </blockquote> Also, <blockquote> 'We just recently recruited a vice president for human resources from the supermarket industry,' said Mike A. Helm, a senior executive at Sutter Health, a hospital chain with 45,000 employees in Northern California. Sutter hires 20 to 30 executives a year. </blockquote> At most, becoming a top healthcare executive only requires some course-work on health care management, perhaps on-line rather than in a classroom. Again, no real experience giving care, or knowledge of medicine or biology is required. For example, <blockquote> Colin Ward, a 37-year-old Baltimore hospital executive, also successfully switched careers, leaving ESPN after eight years of producing sports broadcasts. 'I felt like I wanted to be contributing in some other way,' he said. After 11 months of graduate classes in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a year as a paid apprentice at a Baltimore hospital, he had a master’s degree in health science and management. Mr. Ward stayed at the hospital, Lifebridge Health, for three more years and in 2007 moved to his current post at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Md., as director of corporate strategy. </blockquote> In general, <blockquote> Many managers with experience in fields like human resources, finance and marketing find a welcome in health care, with a little studying up. Online courses, books, journals and professional magazines provide material. </blockquote> The article argued that managing health care information technology also does not require any real knowledge of actual health care. <blockquote> The Obama administration’s $19 billion 10-year campaign to promote electronic medical records opens another huge opportunity, said Dr. Blackford Middleton, a technology research expert at Partners Healthcare in Boston. An estimated 40,000 to 160,000 additional health information professionals could be needed, he said. The industry trade association, known as Himss [sic] for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, offers an array of online courses that can help technology workers move into health care. </blockquote> The article did allow <blockquote> Health care does, of course, have its own jargon and a host of complex challenges. Managers have to know how to deal with doctors, nurses and professional groups, as well as with regulators. </blockquote> But perish the thought that health care executives who have to deal with lesser species like doctors, nurses and other professionals have to understand much about what these lowly folks actually do. Somehow, the lessons from the bankrupt automobile companies led by executives with business degrees but no real knowledge of or interest in automobiles and how they are made, and from failed finance companies which sold complex financial derivatives that their executives did not understand do not seem to obtain. It does all have a certain degenerate, bubble about to burst odor. The notion is the health care boom is so intense that anyone can run a health care organization. We did find out that anyone can run an automobile company or finance firm too. The results just may not be so pretty. Is it any wonder that in this climate, people with no understanding of the health care mission are running health care organizations, and soon the organizations are run in conflict with that mission? As we have said before, to really reform health care, we need health care leaders who actually understand health care, and support its values. But the bubble may have to burst before many people learn that lesson. For now, there is too much money to be made.

NY Times Proclaims Anyone Can Run a Health Care Organization "with a Little Studying Up"

Last week, the NY Times published a somewhat breathless article on the wonderful opportunities available in health care management. Health ...

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WellCare "Did Not Contest" that its Political Contributions Violated State Law

From a <a href="http://blogs.tampabay.com/buzz/2009/08/huge-fine-levied-over-dubious-campaign-donations.html">report</a> in the St Petersburg (Florida) Times: <blockquote> WellCare Health Plans on Wednesday admitted to making 129 'questionable' contributions to Florida politicians over four years ending in 2007. In a consent order with the Florida Elections Commission, the Tampa-based managed-care company agreed to pay a $120,000 fine and did not contest the commission's finding of probable cause that the contributions violated state law. The Associated Press reported in February that WellCare, its subsidiaries and executives spent $2.4 million in political contributions in the 2004 and 2006 elections. More than 95 percent went to Republicans, who pushed a plan to send more state and federal Medicaid spending through private companies like WellCare. </blockquote> In May, 2009 we <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/05/wellcare-settles-accepts-deferred.html">posted</a> about WellCare's submission to a deferred prosecution agreemeent based on charges that it defrauded state programs by inflating its expenses. In 2007, we <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2007/11/health-plans-programs-cancelled-for.html">posted</a> about how the state of Connecticut stopped WellCare from running a plan for poor children after the company refused to reveal what it was paying physicians, and why it was failing to pay for particular services. So WellCare has paid three penalties for three different kinds of unethical behavior in the last two years. WellCare is one of numerous health care organizations which seem to be serial violators of reasonable ethical norms. Usually, however, the penalties paid for these behaviors are trivial, given the financial capacities of the offending organizations. Furthermore, rarely are the individuals who made the decisions that caused the behaviors identified, much less subjected to negative consequences. Given our continued permissiveness towards all sorts of deception, dishonesty, cheating, and even outright fraud, bribery, and corruption, is it any wonder that the unethical behavior continues? Such behavior doubtless directly drives up costs. Furthermore, leaders focused on their personal power and enrichment may not lead well, and demoralize employees and professionals who want to do the right thing, leading to further cost increases, access decrements, and threats to health care quality. I submit that to truly reform health care, and have a chance at improving cost, quality, and access, we cannot continue to shrug off these sorts of ethical violations. A postscript - as we have noted before, one member of the <a href="http://ir.wellcare.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=176521&p=irol-govboard">WellCare board of directors </a>is Regina Herzlinger, a well known and prolific health policy expert, and holds the <a href="http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facEmId=rherzlinger">Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration Chair of the Harvard Business School</a>. As far as I know, Prof Herzlinger is one of the many health policy experts who avoids discussing the sorts of problems with the accountability, integrity, and transparency of health care leadership which is grist for the mill here at Health Care Renewal. Perhaps, Prof Herzlinger, like many other main stream health policy experts, should learn to acknowledge that health care leadership may be unaccountable, opaque, dishonest, and sometimes flagrantly corrupt. Furthermore, Prof Herzlinger, like many other well-paid board members of health care organization, should pay a bit more attention to the mischief being committed by those who answer to her.

WellCare "Did Not Contest" that its Political Contributions Violated State Law

From a report in the St Petersburg (Florida) Times: WellCare Health Plans on Wednesday admitted to making 129 'questionable' contri...

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