In the last few years, the U.S. health care system has seemingly been gripped by “back to the nineties” fever. Back then, we had a Democratic president working to reform the health care system. Experts from across this system were promoting the importance of controlling health care costs; the growth of health care expenditures even…
In a few months, we will find out whether the Supreme Court has decided that a critical part of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. If that happens, lots of people will be in lots of trouble, financially speaking. Here is a wonderful article in a North Carolina newspaper laying out some of the issues…
A while back, I posted an interesting effort to get people to walk upstairs, rather than take the escalator. It involved a staircase designed to look like a piano, with musical sounds generated when people stepped on each stair. I love that approach not only because it is clever, but because I am a serious…
A quick quiz before we start today’s lesson. What do we call a tree that grows from acorns? What do we call a funny story? What sound does a frog make? What is another word for a cape? What do we call the white part of an egg? On that last question, were you tempted…
Bret Stephens won a Pulitzer Prize for his foreign affairs column in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Only in his early 40s, Stephens can already boast of an enviable number of accomplishments. He has already been Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post. And he is now Deputy Editor at the Wall Street Journal, one of…
She didn’t talk like a stroke victim. “I…I…I…k…kkk…can…can…can’t…t…t…t…talk.” She struggled with her words, struggling on early syllables, only to then spurt out full and correct words. “N…N…N…No.” Recognizing this unusual speech pattern, the neurologist Allan Ropper, author of Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, expertly queried the patient and her loved ones, and determined she had…
The Managing Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine interviewed me about the piece I wrote, with David Comerford and Eric Johnson, on redesigning the health insurance exchanges. For those of you with long commutes, here is that podcast: Healthcare.gov 3.0
Here is a nice follow-up story on my recent New England Journal article on improving the design of health insurance exchanges. Comparing health insurance plans – whether signing up through Healthcare.gov or weighing employer-sponsored plans with a spouse – can feel like wading through a sea of information on deductibles, co-payments and monthly premiums. Now…
Nudge is one of the most important and influential books on behavioral science and public policy I’ve ever read. Co-authored by economist Richard Thaler and lawyer Cass Sunstein, the book lays out the rationale for adopting policies designed to make it more likely that people will act in their own best interests rather than, say,…
I joined two other, much smarter, colleagues in calling for the use of behavioral economics and decision psychology to improve the design of the websites people use to purchase health insurance in the U.S. That article came out today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here is a taste: In October 2013, the Affordable…