Some people look at the figure below, and say that too few insurance companies have too much of the market for Medicare Advantage (a program that allows Medicare recipients to get private coverage). But I look at it and think it looks like a pretty robust market:
What do you think?
We spend more for medical care in the United States than just about anywhere in the world, but it’s not because people in this country get admitted to the hospital and stay for long periods of time. Instead, we have shorter length of stays in American hospitals than in the vast majority of developed countries…
Mammograms for breast cancer; the PSA blood test for prostate cancer; CT scans for lung cancer; and things like stool blood tests and colonoscopies for colon cancer. Each of these screening tests is designed to find cancers, or precancers, before they become symptomatic, the goal of early detection being to enable clinicians to eradicate growths…
A while back, I wrote a piece on the problems caused when hospitals don’t coordinate care in a way that promotes patient sleep. Now Shefali Luthra, a reporter at Kaiser Health News, has written a great piece, delving deeper into this issue. Here is the beginning of that story: Hospitals are reviewing their patient-sleep policies and…
“If we can understand autism, we can understand the brain.” Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel (Click here to view comments)
Keeping with my recent theme on US healthcare prices, from the people at Vox media, here’s an illustration of how expensive it is to get an MRI in the United States versus other countries: And the cost of a day in the hospital: Sigh…
Thanks to the popularity of medical television shows, most people have witnessed hundreds of fictional cardiac arrests in their lifetime. In most of these scenes, the patient loses consciousness, and the medical team rushes to the bedside: “He’s in V-fib.” “Get me the paddles.” The team performs urgent chest compressions for a few seconds. Then…