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?
I have two reasons for showing you this picture, illustrating the decline in cigarette sales in Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland and the US over the past few decades. First, to show you the decline in cigarette sales in Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland and the US over the past few decades. Second, to encourage those of…
Shutterstock Death by a thousand bureaucratic demands. That’s how many American physicians currently describe their jobs, with work days that often don’t end until long after their kids go to sleep, when they finally finish documenting their clinical interactions. You see, government regulators and insurance company bureaucrats have been imposing a growing number of quality measurements on…
Here is a nice, cautionary article from Consumer Reports reporter, Donna Rosato, on the downsides of high deductible health insurance plans: High deductible health insurance plans were supposed to help consumers cut healthcare costs. The idea was that since consumers would have to pay a large chunk of their own money for medical care before…
I have absolutely no confidence that this approach will work, but I don’t even care because it is so hilarious. Thanks to Pelle Hansen (@Peguha) for tweeting this image.
Sometimes 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…
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…