Health Insurance Exchange Decisions…So Far!
But in this partisan world, not all states are going ahead with the idea of creating these exchanges. The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff has a nice summary, in one simple picture, of where things stand:
See this great piece by a reporter at Forbes discussing why rare disease treatments can cost as much as $400,000 per patient, per year. You will get a glimpse of my take on this topic too, but I plan on writing more about it in the future.
As I have described in two earlier posts, here and here, the transplant system in the US suffers from terrible geographic disparities. People needing liver transplants in Northern California wait more than six years on average for an organ to become available, versus only three months in places like Memphis Tennessee. The solution to the…
NPR’s Planet Money published two excellent graphs this week, comparing health care spending in the US now versus the 70s and 90s. For example, here’s what they reveal about hospital versus non-hospital spending: In other words, hospitals have a shrinking proportion of the health care dollar, but not one that is shrinking very much. Despite…
Are there really too few primary care physicians? And if so, what can we do to solve the PCP shortage? The standard answer to the first question is “yes, we have too few PCPs.” And the standard solution is to train more such docs, or allow more foreign-trained primary care docs into the country or,…
It is pothole season in Michigan, with roads crumbling under the pressure of winter cold. Then again, with the condition of our state’s dismal economy, pothole season is becoming a year-round phenomenon here in the Great Lake State. Michigan’s government can no longer afford to fix roads like it used to, and the same goes…
I recently learned about a company called OpsCost, which has a very user-friendly website designed to help people figure out how much different hospitals charge for a wide range of treatments and procedures. The company makes use of the data that the Medicare program has recently made available to the general public, and then presents…