Imagine you are CEO of a chain of nursing homes. You know that the sicker your patients are, the more money you will get from Medicare. You also know that Medicare determines how sick patients are by counting how many diagnoses they have and assessing the severity of those diagnoses. Given these facts, what would you tell your staff to do? Read more here
During his campaign, President Trump promised to “end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.” In honor of that promise, Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Medicare program, should address the enormous increase in what Medicare patients are being asked to pay for drugs. Medicare drug coverage is…
The video below is not super high quality, but it captures a talk I gave in Lima Peru recently, a very personal talk that also reveals some of the dangers of assuming that medical decision making will go swimmingly well as long as patients are informed and empowered. Check it out. (Click here to view…
Charlotte Scott had an eye for madness—for just the right amount of madness. As a booker for The Springer Show, her job was to find—and forgive me if I’m getting too technical here—minor nut jobs, the kind of people who were just unbalanced enough to make for entertaining T.V. but not so wacky that they would…
This weekend, I had the pleasure of being a guest on Peoples Pharmacy, a great public radio show that hails out of Durham NC. We had a far ranging, rapidly shifting conversation about lots of things. Check it out if you are interested. The show even gave me a chance to learn a new skill. …
Here is an awful thing about high deductible health plans: They delay breast cancer diagnosis and get in the way of proper breast cancer care.
In a recent post, I asked whether you think doctors should routinely discuss the costs of medical interventions with their patients before exposing these patients to large out-of-pocket expenses. According to the responses I have gotten on websites and by email, most of you think the answer is “yes.”
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