Puncture

Found out today that the Tribeca Film Festival is screening Puncture.  I haven't seen it (yet), but I hear that as a movie it is basically a dramatization of the consequences of the GPO structure in America.  Read Mariah Blake's excellent article in Washington Monthly for more.

For those who don't know, Group Purchasing Organizations, or GPOs, negotiate medical equipment and consumable prices from suppliers for healthcare providers.  They claim to negotiate the lowest possible prices from vendors for the providers in their network, however, this is a dubious claim  (PDF) at best:

Two factors worth commenting on:

1) in 1991, HHS established a "safe harbor" exception for GPOs from anti-kickback laws that said, essentially, that GPOs can pay their clients back, in cash, a percentage of the total revenue generated by said client.  This kickback is classified as an administrative fee, and it gives hospital managers an incentive to spend more on their supplies, not less.

2)  smaller medical device manufacturers, like the "safety syringe" guy in the WaMo article and in the Litan/Singer report linked above, suffer from exclusionary agreements negotiated between the big medical vendors and the GPOs, sometimes to the detriment of patients and providers (which is the focus of the film).

I'll be going on and on about GPOs on this blog, mostly related to point #1.  But this is a good place to start, and it helps that people are beginning to notice.  Here's hoping the film gets a wider release.