Donna Rosato, an excellent journalist at CR, as the cool kids call it, just published an excellent article highlighting some of our research on money talk in the doctor’s office. Here is a teaser. A growing body of research has found that as people pay more out of pocket for their healthcare, they’re likely to put off treatment instead of seeking a…
Just three weeks earlier, she had noticed something strange about one of her breasts. An irregular shape. Her daughter brought her to the doctor, and soon the patient, I’ll call her Amanda, was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage “to be determined.” In fact, she was now in an oncologist’s office, learning what tests she would…
One of the best podcasts out there is NPR’s The Hidden Brain. Here is a recent episode discussing the challenges of being a, yawn, astronaut on a long voyage. It covers some fun research I did with David Comerford. Here is the beginning of the print version. But you might want to check out the audio….
Here is a very interesting essay in the Arkansas Business Journal, which ties our research on physician patient conversations into a broader message about the importance of good communication in business. Glad to see our work is having an impact. Considering all of the technical advances and new complexities in marketing today (such as social,…
I have absolutely no confidence that this approach will work, but I don’t even care because it is so hilarious. Thanks to Pelle Hansen (@Peguha) for tweeting this image.
For a while last fall, it looked like the Obamacare health insurance exchanges were spinning towards a death spiral. Enrollment in the health insurance exchanges was not growing as rapidly as many people had hoped. United Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest insurers, announced that it intended to pull out of the exchanges soon, convinced…
I blog frequently about obesity. I think the most important thing we can do, as a nation, to combat obesity is to try to prevent our next generation of children from becoming obese. Once people become obese, almost no diet in the world will consistently help them lose weight and maintain that weight loss. But…
The United States far outspends peer countries on healthcare. When American politicians complain about these high healthcare costs, they often vilify pharmaceutical and insurance companies for profiting at the expense of the general public. As I wrote earlier, such vilification is misguided, pushing too much of the blame on individual actors rather than on the…
Many companies spend lots of money providing health insurance coverage to their employees. And the costs of that coverage continue to rise, in part because the girth of the American public is also rising. Overweight and obese employees cost companies money, through increased sick leave, disability claims and, of course, healthcare expenses. As a result,…
Thanks again to the Kaiser Family Foundation for keeping all of us informed about important healthcare statistics. Here’s a relatively recent snapshot of how the percent of Americans lacking health insurance has fluctuated since the 1970s. The effect of Obamacare on the statistic is undeniable: