Here’s the Medical Care People Skip Because of Cost
According to a report from FamiliesUSA, an organization advocating for improved healthcare coverage, these are the medical services people forego when money gets tight:

I know, I know: correlation does not mean causation. But it is still suspicious that when industry employees join as co-authors in medical journals, the randomized trials they are writing about are more likely to show positive results – results that make industry products look good. At least that was the finding from a study…
Here is a very interesting picture from the Atlantic website, charting the unpredictability of healthcare costs. The picture was put into the article in large part to point out how hard it is to estimate how much healthcare costs will grow over time. And certainly, the up-and-down roller coaster like quality of this picture is…
In a recent post, I pointed you towards a very nice article by Jason deBruyn about controversies over the role of nurse practitioners in providing primary care. A recent study in the journal Health Affairs showed that when states loosen up their regulations over what nurse practitioners can do, the percent of people receiving primary…
California is in the middle of an historic drought, with the government setting limits on how long people can sing in the shower. Farmers in the state may soon need to cut back on planting or production, as ground water dries up. But California is still fruitful ground for testing promising ways to improve how…
I blog frequently about obesity. I think the most important thing we can do, as a nation, to combat obesity is to try to prevent our next generation of children from becoming obese. Once people become obese, almost no diet in the world will consistently help them lose weight and maintain that weight loss. But…
Aggressive control of blood pressure has saved millions of lives, and has prevented millions of people from experiencing heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure, among other things. Admittedly, controlling blood pressure is not the sexy part of medical care, but when primary care doctors like me help people get their blood pressure under control, we…