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,…
Listen to this Marketplace report on consolidation in the world of health insurance. It is an interesting report, and also the first public acknowledgment that I am, gulp, a Business Professor!
If you thought donuts were bad for your health, consider donut holes. Specifically, the donut hole sitting smack in the middle of Medicare Part D, the program helping senior citizens pay for their medications. The donut hole is a gap in coverage causing people, once they’ve received a certain level of financial support for their prescriptions, to have to go it alone for a while, bea
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Taxes are inevitable, or so they say. How much we should tax our citizenry, however, is debatable. Tea party members think we tax too much, and many liberals think we don’t tax quite enough. I’m not going to take a position on the overall tax burden right now. Instead, I’ll point out two things I…
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…
This week, my good friend Reshma Jagsi and I published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which we explain why physicians are doing their job, as physicians, when they pay attention to healthcare costs. Here is a snippet from that article, and a link to find the full version. Health care costs…
