Health insurance is not what it used to be. With increasing frequency, Americans who purchase private health insurance find themselves with plans that require them to fork over significant amounts of money every time they receive healthcare. That means if you get, say, a heart attack, your portion of the hospital bill is probably going to be significant.
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“Dose Response” – The Sciences
My student and colleague, Karen Scherr, recently published an excellent article showing that physicians don’t always describe robotic surgery in an unbiased manner. Here is a nice write up of that work: Author Peter Ubel referred to a study done at four Veterans Affairs medical centers of men making decisions on how best to treat…
For a while last fall, it looked like the Obamacare health insurance exchanges were spinning towards a death spiral. Enrollment in the health insurance exchanges was not growing as rapidly as many people had hoped. United Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest insurers, announced that it intended to pull out of the exchanges soon, convinced…
Many Americans are buying healthcare insurance that asks them to pay a lot, out-of-pocket, for the care they receive. It looks like that trend, towards higher expenses, is especially common among higher income folks, as shown by this picture courtesy of the Commonwealth Fund:
She came to the urgent care center with a sprained ankle. The primary care provider gave her excellent care, expertly applying evidence-based evaluation guidelines to her situation, and, thereby, avoiding unnecessary x-rays. By all measures, the provider’s care was excellent, but the interaction still ended up reducing his salary. You see, that patient’s only medical…
Most conservatives agree that Medicaid costs are too high. Most liberals agree that Medicaid patients should receive necessary medical care for free. And both conservatives and liberals agree that we should embrace ways to encourage Medicaid patients to obtain important preventive care services, in hopes that such services will lower healthcare costs by promoting public…