Rationing By Any Other Name
“Rationing By Any Other Name” – The New England Journal of Medicine
“Rationing By Any Other Name” – The New England Journal of Medicine
This picture shows changes in the cost of treating colon cancer, from 1993-2005. It shows unsustainable growth in these expenditures: By unsustainable, however, I do not mean unjustifiable. Patients with colon cancer have much better prognoses in 2005 than 1993, in large part due to advances in chemotherapy. Instead what I mean by unsustainable is…
There are lots of things we need to do to get healthcare costs under control in the United States. Critical to most of our efforts, however, is to get physicians to practice cost-conscious care. Here is a nice story on this topic, from Rebecca Plevin at KPCC public radio in California: As regular readers of…
Do you think it is safe to eat genetically modified foods? I do, because I believe that most foods we eat have been genetically modified. Cows wouldn’t be cows if humans hadn’t changed them genetically, through breeding practices. That also might be because I’m a scientist, and one of the beliefs that separates scientists from…
The United States far outspends peer countries on healthcare. When American politicians complain about these high healthcare costs, they often vilify pharmaceutical and insurance companies for profiting at the expense of the general public. As I wrote earlier, such vilification is misguided, pushing too much of the blame on individual actors rather than on the…
A former student of mine who now works at the Advisory Board recently emailed me some figures her company put together, offering a snapshot of how many people are being hired in oncology practices to help patients with their financial concerns: I am very eager to see what these figures look like over the next…
Want to know why we spent so much on healthcare in United States? There are lots of reasons. Our population is aging, the rate of diabetes is rising, and the healthcare industry keeps developing wonderful but expensive new technologies to treat our ailments. But more than anything, we have a price problem. It’s price increases…