Here, from the Financial Times, is a picture showing that the lower your income, the less increase you’ve gotten in life-expectancy the last four decades:
Income inequality is one of the largest human problems of this century.
The U.S. healthcare system has an unsung hero – community health centers, which provide basic medical care for under-served communities. Even dental care! Right now 1 in 6 Medicaid enrollees receives care at one of these centers, a proportion that has been growing for decades: In some states, 1 in 3 enrollees use community health…
Thanks to the popularity of medical television shows, most people have witnessed hundreds of fictional cardiac arrests in their lifetime. In most of these scenes, the patient loses consciousness, and the medical team rushes to the bedside: “He’s in V-fib.” “Get me the paddles.” The team performs urgent chest compressions for a few seconds. Then…
Here’s a picture from a New England Journal of Medicine article showing that in 2015 and 2016, Obamacare premiums grew more slowly than private insurance premiums rose before the law came into effect: The Obamacare markets are new and unsettled. But so far they aren’t leading to runaway inflation. But what will happen to these…
For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been highly profitable. The recipe for such profits has been pretty simple for most of the last half-century–discover a chemical or molecule that treats a common problem, like hypertension or diabetes or erectile dysfunction, and make billions of dollars while that product is still under patent protection. But of…
Recently, Dr. R. Adams Dudley, director of the UCSF Center for Healthcare Value, circulated a picture illustrating rapid growth in the use of tests and other imaging procedures between 2000 and 2013. I thought it deserved further circulation. It reveals 60-80% expansion of testing and imaging, with only – only? – a 40% increase in…
Shutterstock How excited would you be about a medication that lowered your risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, or stroke by 1.5%? Excited enough to spend a few thousand dollars a year on the drug? I expect not. What if, instead, the drug reduced those same terrible outcomes by 20%? That’s probably enough benefit to…