Here is a public service advertisement, promoting vaccines. (Thanks to Michelle Meyer for making me aware of it.) It harkens back to a day when vaccines weren’t yet available for diseases like polio:
Do you think it will work?
Here is a picture, courtesy of the Financial Times, showing obesity rates among OECD nations. Only 5% of people living in Korea and Japan qualify as obese. Yet obesity rates are drastically higher in the United States; if someone’s in American, there is practically a 4 in 10 chance they are obese. Not something to…
In a minute, I’m going to ask you what the most expensive medical condition is in the American healthcare system. Before you guess, however, I’m going to explain what I mean by “most expensive.” I’m not talking about cost per patient. Some people with cancer receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of chemotherapy per year,…
All else equal, it would be wonderful if hospitals had an incentive to provide high quality care. It does not seem fair to pay the same amount of money to a hospital that does a great job of caring for its pneumonia patients and one that does a lousy job. For the most part, however,…
I realize that I do not have the most focused blog in the world. Some people blog about nothing other than, say, capital punishment or new developments in whiskey. I write about psychology, behavioral economics, ethics, the doctor-patient relationship, health policy, political partisanship… a relatively wide range of things, but topics often linked by the…
They both had shoulder pain, persistent despite weeks of physical therapy. Both received MRI examinations at reputable radiology facilities, looking for things like rotator cuff tears, labral disruptions and other anatomical abnormalities. What was different was the price they paid for the MRI, with one patient paying $1000 more than the other. Welcome to the…
Imagine your physician prescribed an expensive new drug for you. Concerned about its price, you ask what your out-of-pocket costs will be. To help your physician, you even pull out details of your insurance coverage. But even with this information in mind, don’t expect your physician to be able to estimate your costs. The complexity…