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…
It is always important to remember that healthcare and health insurance are two very different things, and neither of them is a guarantee of good health. Therefore, when people talk about Obamacare providing people with medical care, we have to remember that it primarily provides people with health care insurance. And as I have written about previously, insurance coverage…
A quote from Far From the Tree I thought I’d share: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together,…
A recent Gallup poll shows that the percent of Americans without health insurance has dropped significantly in recent months. Here’s a picture of their findings: This drop has occurred largely in response to Obamacare – to the expansion of Medicaid in those states which went along with that provision of the law, and with the…
We all know that healthcare costs in the U.S. are too high. But why is American healthcare so expensive? Some experts blame the desire for profit. Russell Andrews, a neurosurgeon and author of Too Big To Succeed laments “the morphing of American medicine from a function of a humanitarian society into a revenue stream for healthcare profits, drug…
I’m-sure-you-know-this-by-now fact-of-the-day: the US leads the world in healthcare costs. As I’ve written previously, a big reason for this is that prices in the US for healthcare services are higher than elsewhere. This was nicely illustrated in a Health Affairs article from 2012. The article looked at how many physicians per capita practiced across six countries,…
The New Yorker recently published a very nice article on Pope Francis. At one point in the article, the Pope explains why he is trying to deemphasize all the controversies that have taken up so much of the Church’s attention in recent years, controversies about birth control, abortion and the like. His explanation shows a respectable…
Read the following quote, and try to guess which U.S. president made this statement: “A responsible budget is not our only weapon to control inflation. We must act now to protect all Americans from healthcare costs that are rising $1 million per hour, 24 hours a day, doubling every 5 years. We must take control…
In a recently published article, a team of researchers showed that a simple graphical cue, showing people which foods are healthy and unhealthy, significantly improve their eating behaviors. Here is a nice summary of the study results, as summarized on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website: With a problem as large as America’s obesity epidemic,…