Insurance Woes
A great cartoon from the Kaiser Health News website that pithily captures the “wonders” of the American health insurance system.

A great cartoon from the Kaiser Health News website that pithily captures the “wonders” of the American health insurance system.

In a recent Atlantic post, James Hamblin reports on the increasing frequency with which surgeons perform hysterectomies with the assistance of robots. Here is a picture from that post: To be clear: robotic surgery doesn’t mean a robot performs the operation. Instead, the surgeon uses a laparoscope, usually, and the surgeon controls the tools at…
A new study asks Orthopedic surgeons to guess the price of the devices they implant – “the amount your institution currently pays the vendor for the implant.” Despite a lenient grading system, in which the researchers counted as correct any guess within 20% of the actual price, surgeons estimated costs correctly only 1 in 5…
We have experienced an impressive slowdown in the growth of healthcare expenditures in recent years, a slowdown attributed in part to the plethora of important drugs which have gone generic in recent years. But state Medicaid programs, according to a recent study in Health Affairs, could have slowed healthcare costs even more, if they had been quicker to switch patients from trade to…
Recently, Congressman Paul Ryan put together another budget balancing proposal. It has received a lot of attention in the news, even though it is as likely to be enacted as is the Senate Democrat alternative– in other words, it won’t be enacted. Nevertheless, for those of you interested in healthcare and healthcare policy, here’s a…
Over half of Medicare spending is concentrated in 10% of patients. With Medicare expenditures rising at an unsustainable clip, reigning in the costs of those patients is key to controlling healthcare spending. So who are those patients and what expenses are they racking up? (To read the rest of the article, please visit Forbes.)
Jonathan Gruber went from unknown to infamous in the last few weeks, a result of disparaging comments he made about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and even more disparaging ones he made about the American people. According to Gruber, the Obama administration counted on “the stupidity of the American voter” to pass the bill. In fact,…