I teach an undergraduate health policy class at Duke University. Recently, my students asked me whether states potentially hurt themselves by offering generous health care benefits when neighboring states don’t offer such benefits. Then I got home and pulled out a recent issue of Health Affairs, and read the results of a study suggesting that this…
Measuring healthcare quality has become a veritable cottage industry. Quality measures are proliferating so quickly that the Department of Health and Human Services has created a, and I’m not making this up, “Quality Measures Clearinghouse”. At last count, it included more than 2100 such measures. When it comes to health care quality, if you measure…
Students at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill just put together a very thoughtful proposal on how the state of North Carolina could expand its Medicaid program, while still promoting the private insurance market. Here’s a link to a wonderful story, that highlights their efforts and shows, I think convincingly, that the students are taking…
In a very influential 2009 New Yorker essay, Atul Gawande described why health care spending is rampant in McAllen, Texas, an example of the regional variations in healthcare utilization that policy experts at Dartmouth have been studying for years. Indeed, this research has shown much higher spending in places like McAllen, compared to cities like Salem,…
People often show an amazing ability to emotionally recover from difficult circumstances. I devoted my second book, You’re Stronger Than You Think, to this topic. Now comes some really cool research, showing that people’s ability to bounce back from adversity depends, not all that surprisingly, on their underlying personality traits. Although this result is not…
Many readers will recognize Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim that: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Some will even recognize his vehement opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare proposal, before the program was passed into law: “We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb…
Check out this WHYY Radio Times segment I participated in on health care price transparency: When it comes to the cost of treating an illness, do you know how much your care costs? Many experts believe if patients would be more value- and cost-conscious when it comes to choosing where they receive care, overall health…
Another great quote from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: “My mother didn’t want me to be gay because she thought it wouldn’t be the happiest course for me, but equally, she didn’t like the image of herself as the mother of a gay son. The problem wasn’t that she wanted to control my life—although…
I have been worried about healthcare costs for a long time, so the fact that we’ve had a few years in which healthcare costs have risen more slowly than normal hasn’t got me overly excited. I’ve seen this happen before, and worry that costs will accelerate again soon. But a recent study suggests that this…
Dick Thaler, an economist who helped create the field of behavioral economics, came up with a wonderful idea a long time ago to promote retirement savings, a plan he calls Save More Tomorrow. Among the many clever aspects of his plan is the idea of automatic escalation of people’s retirement contributions. Think of the idea…