Healthia: Comparison Shopping, Online, for Health Insurance

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This looks like a useful idea. California only, for now.

At Healthia, we are tremendous believers in the consumer driven healthcare movement sweeping America. Our goal is to provide America’s first comparison shopping and research portal for consumer driven healthcare, enabling businesses and their employees to choose health plans and ancillary health benefits objectively and transparently.
At our beta launch today (2005-Aug-11), we serve the California market with a strong emphasis on HSA compatible plans. We also enable any user across the nation to compare over 50 leading HSA products.

David Cowan has a useful summary of the movement behind this: “Consumer Directed Healthcare” or CDH. Cowan also references this CDH study.

The Power and Politics of Blogs

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Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell (PDF):

Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resources and organization vis-à-vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian, and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the “blogosphere”: the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets. Under specific circumstances – when key weblogs focus on a new or neglected issue – blogs can socially construct an agenda or interpretive frame that acts as a focal point for mainstream media, shaping and constraining the larger political debate.

Via Robin Good

Shopping for Auto Insurance

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Ron Lieber:

Geico, however, lived up to its marketing. Its slick Web site was easy to use and returned a quote of $711.90 for six months. USAA, which covers only current and former members of the U.S. military and their families (that’s us), came in at about $10 more when we called. But the rep noted USAA offers a $50 rebate to customers who buy child car seats. Plus, he told us, it pays an annual dividend averaging 7% to all policyholders depending on how the company performed that year. USAA also had a high J.D. Power ranking.

GE Buys Epic Systems Competitor IDX

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Ross Sneyd:

GE said the IDX acquisition would significantly its health care offerings and aid in its drive to accelerate the transition to electronic health records. IDX’s administrative, clinical and imaging products will complement GE’s Centricity-brand applications, the company said.

“GE and IDX have a shared vision on how to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records across the globe,” Joe Hogan, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, said in a statement.

Grand Rapids Tests Downtown WiFi

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Glenn Fleishman:

The seven vendors who built test hotzones for Grand Rapids, Mich., all showed they had the right stuff: The local paper reports that the city was very satisfied with the results of their vendor face-off. The next goal is figuring out how to set up a no-taxpayer-dollar network, as is the charter of all new municipal efforts. They’re looking at a public/private partnership with a plan ready to bid by December. The town is eyeing local and federal legislation that might restrict their ability to deploy.

Our Senators at Work – Hollywood’s Broadcast Flag via a Senate Commerce Committee Reconciliation Bill

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Our good Senators may soon try to force Hollywood’s broadcast flag on us, via “piggybacking on a Commerce Committee reconciliation” bill, due 10/26/2005. I wonder if our Senators, Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl will do the right thing for Wisconsin residents, or simply slide up to the bar with the Hollywood types? Click on the links above and tell our Senators to stop supporting Hollywood power grabs to the detriment of our fair use rights.