Federalizing Medicaid

Here is a new post I’ve got up at the Health Care Cost Monitor, in which I try to convince folks that even Republicans should be in favor of federalizing Medicaid. I’d love your feedback, as I’m still developing this idea.

Here is a new post I’ve got up at the Health Care Cost Monitor, in which I try to convince folks that even Republicans should be in favor of federalizing Medicaid. I’d love your feedback, as I’m still developing this idea.
The FDA has proposed new labels on grocery store food products, that adjust serving sizes to more accurately capture what Americans eat. Research I conducted with Steven Dallas and Peggy Liu suggests these labels could be a problem. Here is a great media story on our findings: Last year, the Food and Drug Administration announced…
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,…
Over half of Medicare spending is concentrated in 10% of patients. With Medicare expenditures rising at an unsustainable clip, reigning in the costs of those patients is key to controlling healthcare spending. So who are those patients and what expenses are they racking up? (To read the rest of the article, please visit Forbes.)
Here is a nice news report about what the Medicaid portion of the Supreme Court decision means for state governments. Short version: North Carolina needs to decide whether to expand Medicaid by up to 500,000 people, with the federal government picking up 95% of the cost. Left unsaid in this news report: hospitals are going to push hard to expand Medicaid, so they will have more paying customers. Wonder if they will have success in states like NC, with Republican legislatures.
I recently had surgery to relieve an impingement of my left hip. I suffered a complication of the procedure in the hospital where I received the surgery performed follow-up care to treat the complication. As I lay on the table receiving that second treatment I wondered – okay, I mainly wondered “are they really going…
![]()
Ever had a doctor present you with a contract, laying out what you need to do or else? Well, this is an increasingly common practice in medicine.
Michael Volk led a group of us who wrote about this topic recently in The Lancet. Click on this link to check it out.