In the battle to combat obesity, many recent policies have taken aim at restaurants. New York City banned trans fats from restaurants, and now is limiting sugary drink sales. Many local governments have pushed for restaurants to provide calorie estimates to customers, and that effort is going national soon (as part of Obamacare). Why pick…
In this two-minute video, I explained why it can be hazardous to take a guess at what your lifetime risk is of experiencing cancer. I describe a study I conducted with, among others, Angie Fagerlin. This is one of my favorite studies, because it is really counterintuitive and raises important questions about health communication and medical decision-making….
John Adams, second president of the United States, believed that politicians should refrain from talking too much in political settings: “A public speaker who inserts himself, or was urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the…
Here is a very interesting picture from the Atlantic website, charting the unpredictability of healthcare costs. The picture was put into the article in large part to point out how hard it is to estimate how much healthcare costs will grow over time. And certainly, the up-and-down roller coaster like quality of this picture is…
Now that states have decided what they are going to do about health insurance exchanges—those new shopping carts created by Obamacare to help consumers find health insurance who do not get it through their employers—the really tough part begins. State and federal governments need to make sure that consumers understand their health insurance choices. You…
This is WAY outside my normal blogging topicry (topicry?), but I had to point you towards a Smithsnonian article called “Art Attack” by Will Ellsworth-Jones, if for no other reason than to check out the images recreated there of a British street artist named Bansky. Here is one of my favorites, that nicely captures the creativity…
I recently heard Dan Sulmasy give an ethics talk at a conference. Like me, Dan is a general internist. In his talk, he quoted a former President of the Society of General Internal Medicine and I thought I’d pass the quote along. That former President was Nicole Lurie, who now works for the federal government…
In another great New Yorker article, Lauren Collins writes about controversy over taxing wealthy people in France, a controversy that has already caused Gerard Depardieu to move to Belgium and/or Russia. At one point in the article, she interviews experts to get their views on whether such taxes are effective in raising revenue. One expert…
In a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Hangover,” Nick Paumgarten writes about the strange mix of private and government forces that led to the Spanish fiscal crisis. In a wonderful sentence, he evokes one such force, the almost invisibility of debt: It is often hard to perceive an economic crisis. Debt doesn’t look like…
In a 2011 JAMA article, Gil Welch and colleagues looked at how many chronic diseases Medicare enrollees had across different regions of the country. They came up with the following picture: This picture may confirm some of your suspicions. For example, elderly in the north are sicker than ones in, say, Arizona or Southern Florida,…