Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, millions of people receive generous subsidies to cover the cost of health insurance. Some people, in fact, receive coverage for free, their monthly premiums paid in full by the federal government. Unfortunately, even a small change in price can cause people to lose their coverage. That’s important…
We all know what “a complainer” is: it’s a person who finds the dark side of everything, who turns a casual conversation starter—“How are you doing?”—into a somber soliloquy about all the (usually minor) problems making their life unbearable. Too often, people with chronic pain are viewed as complainers by friends, family, and even their…
Anyone who has raised kids knows what happens when you give them a monthly allowance without requiring any work in return: they plop in front of their new videogame consoles while their dirty dishes collect in the sink. That’s the logic behind Republican plans to establish work requirements for people who receive safety net benefits—if…
I am going to be writing about chronic pain: diagnosis, treatment, mistreatment, etc, in upcoming posts. In my first post, i describe part of my own pain journey. The post is here. And it starts with me standing “in the back of the conference hall panicked that I was going blind.”
Your father’s rheumatoid arthritis medicine was working well, fighting off that otherwise debilitating illness. Then he found out that Medicare would no longer pay for the drug. Your aunt’s multiple sclerosis was flaring and her neurologist recommended a promising new treatment. But she learned that she would have to try, and “fail,” on two other…
Many companies are large enough they self-insure—they take on the financial risk of paying for their employees’ health expenses. In these cases, there is no insurance company around to negotiate prices. Instead, your employer must bring itself to the negotiating table (or maybe, these days, to the negotiation-Zoom-room?). That might mean that your costs, including…
Colon cancer is often preventable with timely screening. One way to be screened is through a procedure called colonoscopy, where a physician examines your colon with a camera to look for precancerous polyps. Unfortunately, some physicians are not as thorough as they should be and overlook growths they should be removing. It might be time…
The starting salary of an orthopedic surgeon in the United States is $565,000. Family medicine physicians, by contrast, can expect a starting salary closer to $250,000, a good living by almost any measure, but a pay disparity that doesn’t strike most experts as reflecting the value, or importance, of these two specialties. If Kennedy wants…
People whose immune systems are temporarily or permanently weakened can be susceptible to colds. Consider chronic stress. Ask a group of college students about their emotional lives, and those who report higher levels of stress will be more susceptible to cold symptoms. We know that because researchers have exposed healthy college students to cold viruses…
Mammograms for breast cancer; the PSA blood test for prostate cancer; CT scans for lung cancer; and things like stool blood tests and colonoscopies for colon cancer. Each of these screening tests is designed to find cancers, or precancers, before they become symptomatic, the goal of early detection being to enable clinicians to eradicate growths…