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Is the Profit Motive Ruining American Healthcare?
ByadminWe all know that healthcare costs in the U.S. are too high. But why is American healthcare so expensive? Some experts blame the desire for profit. Russell Andrews, a neurosurgeon and author of Too Big To Succeed laments “the morphing of American medicine from a function of a humanitarian society into a revenue stream for healthcare profits, drug…
You Thought Innovation Was Hard, How about De-Innovation?
ByadminDavid Asch and I recently published an article in Health Affairs on the challenge of getting healthcare practitioners to stop doing things they are accustomed to doing, even when the evidence that those things are harmful becomes overwhelming. Here is a teaser from that article, and a link to the full piece: As hard as…
High Healthcare Costs — Are Insurance Premiums a Cause or an Effect?
ByadminIn 2010, the state of Rhode Island decided to tackle high healthcare costs. It did so by requiring insurers to meet affordability standards. The plan worked, but not for the reasons you probably suspect. Let’s start with what Rhode Island’s standards look like. It required several things of insurers: Premium caps – with annual inflation equal…
When Less is More
Byadmin
Here is a news article discussing a paper I wrote with Michael Volk, in which we try to find ways to keep doctors from harming patients by finding and then getting all worked up over what we in medicine call incidentalomas–unexpected and ultimately benign findings that show up with unnecessary tests. The article is in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week.Tiger Woods and Health Care Reform
ByadminAmerican presidents have been trying to reform our health care system since at least the Nixon era, but with only limited success. Past reform efforts have failed for many reasons. For starters, the U.S. health care system is complex, with the medical industry making up almost 1/6 of our economy. But perhaps the biggest obstacle…
What Grilled Cheese Jesus Has to Do with Randomized Trials of Healthcare Interventions
ByadminI was recently interviewed on NPR’s marketplace by Dan Gorenstein. He did a really nice story on the kind of bravery it takes for health care opinion leaders to put their ideas to the test of a randomized trial, when the world is already ready to pay them huge amounts of money to promote their…

