Physicians need to broach discussions about out-of-pocket costs with patients the same way they discuss a treatment’s side effects, public policy professors wrote. “Admittedly, out-of-pocket costs are difficult to predict, but so are many medical outcomes that are nevertheless included in clinical discussions,” Peter Ubel, MD, of Duke University’s School of Public Policy, and colleagues wrote….
The University of Chicago Medicine’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, where I trained in the early 90s, has been awarded the prestigious Cornerstone Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities for “outstanding contributions from an institution that has helped shape the direction of the fields of bioethics and/or medical humanities.” To learn…
When it comes to healthcare spending, the U.S. is without peer. Consider the 20 countries making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (called the OECD by the cool kids). The organization includes countries like Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, and the Czech Republic. Oh also Finland, France, Germany…you get the idea. It also…
JoAnn Pushkin’s breast cancer was diagnosed at an advanced stage because the density of her breasts obscured the tumor on her mammograms. That was shocking news to Pushkin, who only learned that her breasts were radiologically dense at the time of her diagnosis. Activated by this revelation, she has become a leading advocate of legislation,…
According to a CDC study, about 1/3 of American families either struggled to pay medical bills in 2011 or outright couldn’t pay them! Not surprisingly, this problem is especially big for people with limited financial resources: Just another piece of evidence in favor of something I’ve been talking about lately when giving public lectures: that…
Okay, worst blog post title of the year. But just trying to grab your attention and point you towards a nice USA Today article on doctors and emotional intelligence. “Tamir Mosharrafa, a plastic surgeon in Phoenix, recalls the 20-something woman who came in for liposuction. “Dani” was very lean and very pretty – and “absolutely…