Hazards of High Deductibles?
See this nice article on high deductible health insurance, by a reporter I spoke to, if I remember correctly, while walking my dog in one of Chapel Hill’s nicest parks.
See this nice article on high deductible health insurance, by a reporter I spoke to, if I remember correctly, while walking my dog in one of Chapel Hill’s nicest parks.
I have written about medical marijuana before, relaying research findings showing that the legalization of medical marijuana is associated with a reduction in use of pain medications. Here’s another piece of evidence leading to a similar conclusion, from a study by the research team of Bradford and Bradford out of the University of Georgia. (Athens,…
No surprise to learn that the majority of Republicans dislike Obamacare. But did you know that the majority of Republicans, who SIGNED UP FOR INSURANCE through Obamacare, still dislike the law? That’s one finding from a recent Kaiser survey: Notably, they dislike the law even though they LIKE THEIR INSURANCE: I look forward to the…
Many companies are large enough they self-insure—they take on the financial risk of paying for their employees’ health expenses. In these cases, there is no insurance company around to negotiate prices. Instead, your employer must bring itself to the negotiating table (or maybe, these days, to the negotiation-Zoom-room?). That might mean that your costs, including…
We all know that healthcare costs in the U.S. are too high. But why is American healthcare so expensive? Some experts blame the desire for profit. Russell Andrews, a neurosurgeon and author of Too Big To Succeed laments “the morphing of American medicine from a function of a humanitarian society into a revenue stream for healthcare profits, drug…
Any effort to rein in health care costs needs to account for this graph, showing what percent of medical expenses attributed which group of patients. (Martin Gaynor posted this picture in a recent blog.) I use another version of this in my teaching: Either way, what we have here is an AMAZING concentration of spending….
In a recent Forbes post, I wrote about geographical variation in healthcare expenses, and pointed out that a lot of this variation occurs after people leave hospitals. That’s when people end up in nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities and the like. Well it turns out, not only is there great variation in these expenses, but these…