When it comes to healthcare spending, the U.S. is without peer. Consider the 20 countries making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (called the OECD by the cool kids). The organization includes countries like Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, and the Czech Republic. Oh also Finland, France, Germany…you get the idea. It also…
The US isn’t the only country struggling with the high price of prescription drugs. A decade ago, Germany was facing rapidly rising medication prices. In 2011, it struck back, with a law regulating the price of new medications. Here’s how that law works, and what it has meant for whether Germans have access to new…
Many of the front runners in the presidential campaign are octogenarians. President Trump, a virtual lock to be the Republican nominee, is 73 years old. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are 78 and 77, respectively. Which raises a question: if elected, how likely are they to survive a 4-year term in office? There’s no perfect…
Cinnamon. Buttered popcorn. Strawberry and banana. Yummy tastes and smells that have lingered in my TV room, after my teenage son and his friends finish vaping. E-cigarette companies like Juul are creating flavors designed to lure young customers, following a tradition established by their cigarette-manufacturing predecessors. For a while, the Trump administration appeared poised to…
Medication prices in the US have gone from wild to insane; from expensive to outright unaffordable. But a tripling in prices could save us all a lot of money. Here’s how that would work. It’s a policy known as external reference pricing. The idea is simple. First, the US government would look at how much…
After three months of physical therapy, her doctor told her that it was time to get an MRI. She had already paid off her annual deductible, meaning the imaging test would “only” cost her the $150 co-pay. An imaging center near where she worked charged $1500 for the test. Just two miles away, another facility…
Jay Singh had a nasty head cold. Not a “will-I-survive-this-plague” kind of infection, but also not one he thought, if left to its own devices, would blow over in a day or two. So he went to the primary care clinic near his exurban New York City home. The doctor spent ten minutes examining and…
Last time I checked, the mouth was still part of the human body. If I remember correctly, when people experience mouth problems, they ache just as much (often more) than if they experienced problems elsewhere in their bodies. So why do we still treat care of the mouth differently than other types of medical care?…
I have a book a coming out this fall. The book took many hours to write, with discarded chapters littering my Dropbox folder. My initial book proposal was rejected by every publisher I sent it to. After the withering critiques, I rethought the project and managed to convince the folks at Yale University Press to…
Yes, I’ve ranted about healthcare prices before. On more than one occasion. But I have a new rant for you. It’s not about the high price of new drugs It’s not about a couple pharmo-bro CEOs hiking prices of generic medications by 4 or 5,000% It’s about brand name drugs already on the market, that,…