Economics Behaving Badly
George Loewenstein and I have an Op-Ed in the New York Times today. Check it out, and feel free to add your comments.
George Loewenstein and I have an Op-Ed in the New York Times today. Check it out, and feel free to add your comments.
I just came across this picture, from the Kaiser family foundation website, illustrating just how often employee healthcare costs take up 10% or more of employee payroll. The number was already pretty high more than a decade ago, but it’s gotten even higher: For large employees, this amounts to almost $5 per hour put aside…
If I told you there was a new medicine effective in treating a previously untreatable illness, you might be interested. If you have the illness, you might even read up and try to figure out whether the medicine would work for you. Ideally, you will evaluate the strength of evidence – was it a randomized…
Confused about whether you will need to buy health insurance under the Obamacare mandate? Here is a chart from the Kaiser Foundation Family website that helps you sort things through: (Click here to view comments)
Until recently, hospitals in California had little reason to reduce the fees they charged for procedures like knee and hip replacement. Insurance companies might come their way, trying hard to bargain down their rates. But the hospitals knew that if enough of them said “no” to these lower fees, insurance companies would be left with…
Medicine, today, is supposed to be “patient-centered.” But sometimes the patients feel a little off balance. What can they do when everyone seems to be trying to push aggressive, expensive treatments on them? One solution — or a partial solution — is known as shared decision making, in which patients are given specific tools, such…
For decades now, policymakers have been trying to slow down the growth of healthcare costs. For much of this time, a large part of that effort was directed at hospital spending. American hospitals are extremely expensive, and take care of patients with the most severe illnesses. So if we’re going to control costs, it seems…