Better Off Not Knowing
“Better Off Not Knowing” – Archives of Internal Medicine
“Better Off Not Knowing” – Archives of Internal Medicine
Let’s face it – us men are disgusting. So public policy experts are left to figure out how to keep us from behaving in our normally disgusting manner. Here’s one approach (thanks to Geoff Riley for bringing it to my attention): Think it will work?
Elizabeth Warren describes medical bills as “the leading cause of personal bankruptcy” in the United States. She bases that opinion in part on her own research, in which she and her collaborators surveyed people who had experienced personal bankruptcy, asked them whether they’d experienced health-related financial distress, and concluded that 60% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. result…
Sometimes it is hard for hospitals to provide expensive care to poor patients. When a low-income patient needs $20,000 of chemotherapy, a hospital loses money if that patient cannot pay for the medicine, or pays through Medicaid, with its relatively stingy reimbursement. Fortunately, the federal government created a program for hospitals that care for a…
Here, from the Financial Times, is a picture showing that the lower your income, the less increase you’ve gotten in life-expectancy the last four decades: Income inequality is one of the largest human problems of this century.
A recent New York Times op-ed by Joanne Lipman poses the question: “Is music the key to success?” As a serious amateur musician, I have long credited my half-way respectable pianistic accomplishments to the discipline I gained practicing Chopin etudes, and even to the teamwork I developed practicing Beethoven piano trios. In fact, I frequently pull out these…
Here is a quick review from the Commonwealth Fund showing what happened to jobs in the United States since 2000. A dramatic growth in healthcare jobs, and almost no growth in the rest of the economy: Something to keep in mind, because if we ever get healthcare costs under control, we had better hope to…