Here, from the Financial Times, is a picture showing that the lower your income, the less increase you’ve gotten in life-expectancy the last four decades:
Income inequality is one of the largest human problems of this century.
I recently gave a talk about shared decision making at the annual conference for the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. Here is a nice write-up of that talk. For those of you silly enough not to travel to Florida to hear me pontificate! After listening to the treatment alternatives—surveillance, or active treatment with surgery and radiation—a…
Shutterstock Pharmaceutical companies have been charging way too much for way too many of their products. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton complained about drug prices during the election campaign, but neither political party has taken action since November to tackle the problem. Insurance companies aren’t doing much about this problem either, despite having a…
Many people have warned us that Obamacare will drive up the cost of healthcare insurance, but recent evidence suggests that the problem is bigger than that. According to the Commonwealth Fund, healthcare insurance costs are rising even more quickly outside of the Obamacare exchanges than inside them:
There’s plenty of price gouging in American healthcare. The pharmaceutical industry has gotten plenty of (well deserved) bad press for its pricing practices. At the extreme are people like “Pharma Bro” (and convicted felon) Martin Shkreli, who hiked the price of an important medication to treat infections in AIDS patients by over 5000%. But high and…
Karen Scherr, an MD PhD student working with me, just published a paper showing that physicians don’t always give patients objective advice about the pros and cons of robotic surgery. Here is a news story on her work: Duke University research found that doctors are more enthusiastic about treatments that are readily available, calling into question…
With increasing frequency, Americans are purchasing health insurance plans that require high out-of-pocket costs. Chief among those costs are deductibles, the amount of money a person or family must spend out-of-pocket on medical care in a year before their health insurance “kicks in.” As this figure illustrates, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, deductibles have been…