Similar Posts
What Behavioral Economics Get Wrong About Improving Healthcare
ByadminIt is notoriously difficult to change physician behavior. When it’s discovered that primary care physicians are, say, prescribing too few cholesterol pills or too many antibiotics, it will not be easy to change those behaviors. Physicians are strong-willed people, with lots of things competing for their attention and with many well ingrained habits. That’s why…
Reducing Healthcare Waste: Don’t Expect Patients To Take The Lead
ByadminLena Wright’s best friend was hunched over like a character from a French novel, with spinal bones so thin they would fracture with a fit of sneezing. Determined to avoid that fate, Wright (a pseudonym) asked her primary care doctor to test her for osteoporosis with a DEXA scan, also known as Dual Energy X-ray…
The Cost of New Cancer Drugs (In One Picture)
Byadmin“Specialty drugs” – that’s what they’re called. Not the pills of old, these pharmaceuticals are often given intravenously or through injection. Often more biologic in their synthesis than chemical, they are expensive to produce and often target narrow disease processes, meaning the number of patients likely to benefit from them is much much smaller than,…
How Hospitals Turn Charity Care Into Profits — At Taxpayers' Expense
ByadminSometimes it is hard for hospitals to provide expensive care to poor patients. When a low-income patient needs $20,000 of chemotherapy, a hospital loses money if that patient cannot pay for the medicine, or pays through Medicaid, with its relatively stingy reimbursement. Fortunately, the federal government created a program for hospitals that care for a…
Watch Out for Those Deductibles!
ByadminLots of folks in the U.S. are finding themselves with health insurance coverage that requires them to pay lots of money, in their deductible, before insurance kicks in. Here is a nice piece in Cancer Today Magazine on the topic: Tammy Pope had already exceeded her health insurance plan’s $5,000 deductible for 2015 by August….
Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Who’s The Happiest Cancer Patient Of All?
ByadminIt is not a mirror you can easily use when trimming your beard or flossing your teeth. Because if you face it and aren’t smiling, this is what you see: Nothing but an opaque, glass surface. That’s because the mirror, designed by Berk Ilhan, only becomes reflective when the person facing it smiles: Ilhan designed…