Health policy wonks have been pointing for a while now to large variations in Medicare spending across different parts of the country. Live in Miami, and the government is probably going to spend a heck of a lot more for you on Medicare than if you live in Minneapolis, even after accounting for how healthy or…
I have long been a fan of single sentence paragraphs. I really have. When used properly, an occasional one-off sentence can really stand out, amidst the tumble of longer paragraphs made up of complicated sentences. Here’s a good example from The Power Broker. In this part of the book, Robert Moses has spent an intense…
Imagine you are a small business owner deciding whether to hire two new employees, your 50th and 51st workers respectively. Would you hire them knowing that, by surpassing the magic number 50, you will now be obligated under Obamacare to pay a penalty unless you offer all your employees affordable healthcare insurance? Imagine you are owner of…
For most Medicare patients in United States right now, Medicare pays for hospital stays on the basis of what are called Diagnostic Related Groups or DRGs. You get diagnosed with pneumonia, and your hospital gets payment to treat a typical case of pneumonia. Name the diagnosis, and the hospital will know what it gets paid….
Jennifer spends lots of time with dead things, dead humans actually. She works in a pathology lab. One night, she is asked to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she is struck that it would be a waste to throw away perfectly good meat. So, even though she is against killing and is a vegetarian for moral reasons, she…
In 1925, a handful of extremely wealthy Long Island residents tried to thwart state plans to run highways from New York City through Long Island to beaches that the masses could enjoy. These wealthy people were understandably upset, that part of their property would be taken away to make room for highways and the like….
Healthcare systems are big and complex beasts, that are very hard to transform overnight. In the United States, for example, we have long had a system of care dominated by fee-for-service payment. In this kind of system, the more tests and procedures and office visits that a physician orders, the more that physician gets paid….
In high school, I was taught not to repeat words too often in the same paragraph, or even within a relatively short essay. I know I am not alone in having been taught that way, because many of the people I’ve mentored over the years present me drafts of their writing which show that they…
I’m currently in the middle of reading Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. I’ll be blogging intermittently about this wonderful book over the next few weeks. Expect a few of those posts to be focused on drawing writing lessons from this wonderful author. But a relatively…
If you have been paying attention to US healthcare policy debates lately, you know that hospitals have a price problem. Walk across the street from one hospital to a competitor hospital, and you could easily find yourself facing a $30,000 increase in your medical bills. At one extreme for instance recent information shows that replacing your hip…