Copay Assistance – Good For Patients, Bad For Prices
Peter Bach and I have an essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine laying out some of the problems with pharmaceutical funded copay assistance programs. Check it out.
Peter Bach and I have an essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine laying out some of the problems with pharmaceutical funded copay assistance programs. Check it out.
Shutterstock For a few years, U.S. healthcare spending seemed to be under control, rising no faster than the economy as a whole. The proportion of our GDP spent on healthcare was flatter than a Nebraska cornfield in November. Here’s how much we spent on healthcare, relative to the economy as a whole, between 2009 and…
In a wonderful article on deep cave exploration, Burkhard Bilger shows how powerful comparison can be in putting an unfamiliar topic into context. He is describing the arduous work involved in deep cave exploration. He is describing the risks of being far, far inside the cave when a heavy rain on the surface begins to…
The free market is supposed to be efficient. Yet employers are throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars, by not giving their employees intelligently designed healthcare benefits that encourage them to shop for affordable lab tests. Right now, when your doctor orders a CBC (complete blood count) and a basic chemistry panel (checking your sodium,…
With increasing frequency, Americans are purchasing health insurance plans that require high out-of-pocket costs. Chief among those costs are deductibles, the amount of money a person or family must spend out-of-pocket on medical care in a year before their health insurance “kicks in.” As this figure illustrates, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, deductibles have been…
I recently spoke with Audiey Kao, an ethics expert at the American Medical Association. Our conversation has been released as a podcast. We talked about quite a few things, but the part I enjoyed the most involved a gentle disagreement about healthcare profits. Here is a link to the podcast: AMA Journal of Ethics Podcast:…
If you are wondering why your hourly wage or your salary aren’t rising as quickly as you like, or why your bank account at the end of the year hasn’t grown as much as you intended, don’t forget to take into account just how much more you are probably paying out-of-pocket for the medical care…