Colon Cancer Screening Controversy. Here's What All The Debate Is About.

Paying Doctors Less Is the Key to Better Coverage Conservatives propose to control healthcare costs by bringing the discipline of the free market to bear upon the healthcare system. Some progressive groups advocate controlling costs with a more interventionist plan. But neither approach, as far as I have seen, adequately confronts one of the biggest…
With Thanksgiving behind us, many Americans will not assemble together for a home-cooked meal again for a while. By some estimates, people living in large cities consume the majority of their meals outside the home — at restaurants, coffee shops, bars and food trucks. No surprise, then, that anti-obesity policies are increasingly focused on helping Americans…
More than two-thirds of employers in the US are paying their obese employees in some form or another to lose weight. Some give health insurance discounts to employees based on target BMIs. Others literally dole out cold hard cash to overweight employees who meet weight loss targets. Employers are adopting these strategies because they work. At…
Imagine for a moment you are suffering from an illness that makes you feel like your soul has been run over by an angry defensive lineman, a disease that interferes with your desire to sleep, eat and make love. Oh, and this illness will continue to make you feel this way for the rest of your life. How much would you be willing to pay for a treatment makes you feel normal again?
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A while back, I posted an interesting effort to get people to walk upstairs, rather than take the escalator. It involved a staircase designed to look like a piano, with musical sounds generated when people stepped on each stair. I love that approach not only because it is clever, but because I am a serious…
The National Health Service in the United Kingdom has recently disseminated a wonderful graphic, helping people understand how likely they are to die from scary things, like war and airplane accidents, versus less terrifying but deadlier hazards, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol: In behavioral economics, we talk about something called the “availability…