Action Movies Create Couch Potatoes
ICYMI: When people watch action movies, they consume more calories.

ICYMI: When people watch action movies, they consume more calories.

Atul Gawande has received appropriate praise for his new book. Read it if you haven’t. Meanwhile, here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, to whet your appetites: Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even…
For a while last fall, it looked like the Obamacare health insurance exchanges were spinning towards a death spiral. Enrollment in the health insurance exchanges was not growing as rapidly as many people had hoped. United Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest insurers, announced that it intended to pull out of the exchanges soon, convinced…
Many companies spend lots of money providing health insurance coverage to their employees. And the costs of that coverage continue to rise, in part because the girth of the American public is also rising. Overweight and obese employees cost companies money, through increased sick leave, disability claims and, of course, healthcare expenses. As a result,…
The Commonwealth Fund recently circulated information on the widespread difficulty many Americans have paying for their medical care, even when they have insurance. Burdened by high co-pays and high coinsurance rates, these out-of-pocket expenses are putting people on the financial edge. Here is a picture of the results, which show that a third of people…
Hepatitis C has been in the news lately, because of amazing (and amazingly expensive) new treatments that promise to cure their life-threatening illness. While we ought to debate the expense of these treatments, we should also remind ourselves of how much we’ve been spending caring for patients with advanced disease. Here’s a picture showing the…
Recently, I showed some data illustrating the rapid growth in healthcare jobs in the United States, compared to jobs in other parts of the economy. Here’s a picture, courtesy of Dan Diamond, showing that this growth has not been steady. Instead, the growth of hospital jobs in the US stalled for a while, before taking…