Here’s the Medical Care People Skip Because of Cost
According to a report from FamiliesUSA, an organization advocating for improved healthcare coverage, these are the medical services people forego when money gets tight:
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Have Reimbursement Rules Taken the Joy Out of Being A Physician?
She came to the urgent care center with a sprained ankle. The primary care provider gave her excellent care, expertly applying evidence-based evaluation guidelines to her situation, and, thereby, avoiding unnecessary x-rays. By all measures, the provider’s care was excellent, but the interaction still ended up reducing his salary. You see, that patient’s only medical…
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Houston (and the Rest of the US Healthcare System): We Have a Price Problem
Want to know why we spent so much on healthcare in United States? There are lots of reasons. Our population is aging, the rate of diabetes is rising, and the healthcare industry keeps developing wonderful but expensive new technologies to treat our ailments. But more than anything, we have a price problem. It’s price increases…
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Does the Thought of Money Make Us Dishonest?
Here is a game you can’t lose. You flip a fair coin ten times and every time it comes up heads, you get $20. Better yet, I won’t even watch you flip the coin, but instead will trust whatever you tell me about the number of times the coin comes up heads versus tails. Would…
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Today’s Science Lesson
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics. You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
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Russell Wilson's Recovery Water: Miracle Cure or Magical Thinking?
Russell Wilson took a hard hit to the head in the NFC Championship game last year against the Green Bay Packers. His team, the Seattle Seahawks, won the game, but would Wilson, the team’s star quarterback, recover in time for the next game? That game, by the way, goes by the name The Super Bowl….
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Reaction to My Thoughts on Improving Ethics Education
A while back, I wrote a piece in the Hastings Center Report proposing a better way of teaching ethics to professionals, like medical students. I thought such education should be grounded less in philosophy and more in understanding the psychology of our moral behavior. Glad to see that my ideas have been picked up, in…
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Unnecessarily Uninsured
This picture, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows that many people who lack health insurance in the United States right now are actually eligible for either Medicaid or federally subsidized private insurance.
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Paying for "Patient Satisfaction" Harms Hospitals That Care for Poor People
All else equal, it would be wonderful if hospitals had an incentive to provide high quality care. It does not seem fair to pay the same amount of money to a hospital that does a great job of caring for its pneumonia patients and one that does a lousy job. For the most part, however,…
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Obamacare Isn’t Helping the “Tweeners” Much Yet
The Affordable Care Act has done a lot to increase the proportion of Americans with health insurance. I’ve posted a lot of those figures in the past. But here is some data, published by a former student of mine, showing that the law doesn’t seem to be having a huge impact yet on people ages…