The United States is finally catching up to the rest of the developed world by integrating electronic medical records (EMRs) into our healthcare systems. I thought I would share a couple pictures illustrating just how quickly the U.S. healthcare system is adopting these EMRs. The first picture comes from an article by Emily Jones and…
Jonathan Gruber went from unknown to infamous in the last few weeks, a result of disparaging comments he made about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and even more disparaging ones he made about the American people. According to Gruber, the Obama administration counted on “the stupidity of the American voter” to pass the bill. In fact,…
The food stamp program helps over 40 million Americans pay for groceries. Unlike other forms of economic assistance, this program, called SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), only pays for food, thereby constraining how recipients make use of the aid. But are food stamps constrained enough? SNAP recipients experience higher rates of obesity and diabetes…
It is well known that Medicare expenditures threaten the financial solvency of the U.S. government. And it is pretty well agreed upon that some of our Medicare spending goes towards wasteful medical care. But which medical care is wasteful and how much is such care costing us? A study in JAMA Internal Medicine provides a…
Here is the opening of a recent media story, reporting on a noble attempt researchers made to promote colon cancer screening by telling people when their genetic risk of such cancer was elevated: People at average-risk for colorectal cancer (CRC) who underwent genetic and environmental risk assessment (GERA) to evaluate their risk for CRC were…
In collaboration with Peggy Liu and Jim Bettman, I’ve had fun doing some research on just how hard it is for people to guess how many calories they are consuming, at restaurants like Chipotle where everyone puts different ingredients on their burrito. Here is the beginning of an absolutely excellent journalist’s take on the topic:…
For decades now, policymakers have been trying to slow down the growth of healthcare costs. For much of this time, a large part of that effort was directed at hospital spending. American hospitals are extremely expensive, and take care of patients with the most severe illnesses. So if we’re going to control costs, it seems…
Clearly we in the United States are not taking the obesity epidemic as seriously as the Russian government. We debate whether it is appropriate for the government to require restaurants to inform their customers about how many calories they are consuming. Whereas in Moscow, sit at a park bench, and it will tell you how…
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in June (no one accused me of being a timely blogger!) shows that academic medical centers often provide poorly-reimbursed services that other healthcare institutions avoid. Where more general hospitals might avoid having psychiatric emergencies available, 90% of academic medical centers offer such services: Whereas only 4%…
There was a very nice piece in the Washington Post recently, exploring the relationship between life satisfaction and the minimum wage. They summarize their findings in the following figure: I suggest you read the piece, to see what they make of this connection. Importantly, they explicitly mentioned that correlation does not prove causation. Unfortunately they…