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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Peter Bach and I have an essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine laying out some of the problems with pharmaceutical funded copay assistance programs. Check it out.
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…
Here is a figure reproduced in Fortune, showing that when researchers publish articles raising questions about the harms of salt, they cite other researchers who raised similar questions. By contrast, when they definitively argue in favor of the harms, they cite other definitive colleagues. Some of this makes scientific sense. If you show a particular…
Shutterstock When it comes to wreaking havoc on people’s bodies, diabetes isn’t picky, wreaking havoc upon people’s hearts, brains, eyes, kidneys, and peripheral nerves. To forestall such damage, many people with diabetes withstand another kind of bodily harm—they prick blood from their fingers each day to test their blood sugar. For many people with Type…
I post pretty regularly on out-of-pocket medical expenses, a topic I’ve been conducting research on, and one that will fit centrally into the new book I’m writing. Most often when people think about paying for medical care, they think about medications. But as this figure from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, don’t forget about the…
I have been writing a bit lately on the need for healthcare providers to talk with their patients about healthcare costs, if for no other reason than to enable patients to determine whether they can afford to pay for the healthcare that their doctors are recommending them to receive. I have been criticized for this position, on…