Medicare could save more than $4 billion by negotiating prices on just four drugs. Want to guess what those drugs are? Or what diseases they treat? Are they drugs for common diseases, with lots of people yielding lots of savings? Or for rare cancers, where the drugs are so expensive there is still lots of…
In a recent blog post, David Berreby writes about some work that George Loewenstein and I have done on people’s inability to predict how illness or disability will make them feel, and what this inability means for things like “pain and suffering” awards from juries. Thought you might find the blog interesting. Here is the…
Imagine picking up a telephone and hearing your doctor tell you there is a “999 out of 1,000 chance that you’ll be dead within a decade.” That’s what Leonard Mlodinow experienced in 1989, when his routine HIV test didn’t turn out the way he expected. Mlodinow tells this story in his 2008 book, The Drunkard’s Walk,…
“I can fix this.” The neurosurgeon was nothing if not confident. “The cyst is pushing on your spinal cord. If it continues to expand, it will damage your nerves and you may lose the ability to walk. But I can remove the cyst, and cure you.” The patient was a business school professor, a man…
The video below is not super high quality, but it captures a talk I gave in Lima Peru recently, a very personal talk that also reveals some of the dangers of assuming that medical decision making will go swimmingly well as long as patients are informed and empowered. Check it out. (Click here to view…
Could ACOs be costing us money?