There has been controversy recently about whether obesity is truly bad for people’s health, or in fact whether it might even protect people from early mortality. A study from the New England Journal in January provides strong evidence that obesity kills. It shows that people with very low body mass index have high mortality rates,…
Here is a nice picture, from a HuffPo article , showing how much money states are losing by not expanding Medicaid in accordance with the Affordable Care Act: Not a small change, by any measure. Shows how much it means to some folks to prove their anti-ACA bonafides. What is too often lost, in this…
“When many remedies are proposed for a disease, that means the disease is incurable.” -Anton Chekhov (Click here to view comments)
I teach a course on behavioral economics and public policy at Duke University. One of my former students recently emailed me a picture of a bill he received in the mail. It looks like conEdison is trying to remind him to pay his bills electronically, so they don’t have to send him a bill in…
Here is a picture from a recent Atlantic article, showing that, pre-Obamacare implementation, women have more difficulty paying for medical care: The ACA should fix improve this situation, meaning Obamacare should help women more than men. (Click here to view comments)
“If we can understand autism, we can understand the brain.” Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel (Click here to view comments)
I teach an undergraduate health policy class at Duke University. Recently, my students asked me whether states potentially hurt themselves by offering generous health care benefits when neighboring states don’t offer such benefits. Then I got home and pulled out a recent issue of Health Affairs, and read the results of a study suggesting that this…
Measuring healthcare quality has become a veritable cottage industry. Quality measures are proliferating so quickly that the Department of Health and Human Services has created a, and I’m not making this up, “Quality Measures Clearinghouse”. At last count, it included more than 2100 such measures. When it comes to health care quality, if you measure…
Students at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill just put together a very thoughtful proposal on how the state of North Carolina could expand its Medicaid program, while still promoting the private insurance market. Here’s a link to a wonderful story, that highlights their efforts and shows, I think convincingly, that the students are taking…
In a very influential 2009 New Yorker essay, Atul Gawande described why health care spending is rampant in McAllen, Texas, an example of the regional variations in healthcare utilization that policy experts at Dartmouth have been studying for years. Indeed, this research has shown much higher spending in places like McAllen, compared to cities like Salem,…