Healthcare is often really costly. And with increasing frequency, a significant chunk of those costs is being passed on to patients in the form of high deductibles, copays, or other out-of-pocket expenses. As a result, millions of Americans struggle to pay medical bills each year. What’s a poor patient to do? For starters–they can talk…
Old news – healthcare costs are rising again. Older news – healthcare costs have been rising, faster than inflation, for most of the last half-century. Newer news – those costs are increasingly being born by employees rather than employers. Here’s a picture I came across at Vox, an excellent website for healthcare news.
When asked what enemies she was proud to have made during her political career, Hillary Clinton mentioned, in order, “the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies [and] the Iranians.” Pretty villainous company to place healthcare industries into. But Clinton is not alone among presidential candidates in vilifying pharmaceutical and insurance industries for, as…
I recognize that correlation does not prove causation. But here is a picture illustrating the correlation between income inequality and the percent of a country’s population that is obese. The findings are provocative, to say the least. Making the relationship somewhat plausible is all the evidence we have now of the toll that income inequality…
Pizza is pizza, and a full stomach is a full stomach. But when restaurants slice pizza into smaller pieces, you are probably likely to consume less pizza:
The Commonwealth Fund recently circulated information on the widespread difficulty many Americans have paying for their medical care, even when they have insurance. Burdened by high co-pays and high coinsurance rates, these out-of-pocket expenses are putting people on the financial edge. Here is a picture of the results, which show that a third of people…
Advertising is about persuasion. Companies spend billions of dollars per year trying to convince us to buy their products. But sometimes, rigorous philosophical training can help us avoid that influence. Consider the following ad: Only deep immersion in Immanuel Kant helped me recognize the flaws in this reasoning!
David Blumenthal and colleagues recently wrote a wonderful piece in the New England Journal on the future of Medicare. In it, they present a powerful picture comparing how often people in 11 countries have difficulty accessing medical care because of costs. The good news? The USA came in first place. The bad news? First is…
In case you missed it, I am recirculating a picture put together by the Kaiser Family Foundation , which reveals two unsettling facts about health insurance in United States. First, the cost of employer-based health insurance has risen 61% since 2005. When health insurance premiums rise, salaries don’t. That’s a problem. Second, worker contributions have…
I got an unusual email message a little while ago. It was from someone I had never met before, and it wasn’t obvious to me, at first, why this person was contacting me. The email began like this: “I am an engineer and I work in a company of public passenger transport in Buenos Aires….