Quote of the Day
“Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.”
– Helen Keller
“Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.”
– Helen Keller
Shutterstock For a few years, U.S. healthcare spending seemed to be under control, rising no faster than the economy as a whole. The proportion of our GDP spent on healthcare was flatter than a Nebraska cornfield in November. Here’s how much we spent on healthcare, relative to the economy as a whole, between 2009 and…
“CASES: When Bad Advice Is the Best Advice” – The New York Times
If you ever want to know why one is the loneliest number, consider the words of John Tukey, a prominent American mathematician from the 20th century. Not the most socially adept person in the world, he relied heavily on his wife Elizabeth to help them live a normal life. When she died in 1998 Tukey…
Shutterstock Healthcare prices in the U.S. are often hidden. Some people think this price opacity contributes to our nation’s high healthcare spending. If people don’t know how expensive healthcare is, they won’t have much reason to restrain healthcare utilization. A recent study tested what would happen if physicians were immediately informed of the price of lab tests…
Shutterstock Knee replacements are booming. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of knee replacement procedures in the U.S. doubled, to more than one million. Experts think the figure might rise 6-fold more in the next couple decades, because of our aging population. Since many people receiving knee replacements are elderly, Medicare picks up most of…
Take 100 Americans who have used medical care this year, find the one who has receive the most medical care, and you have probably accounted for a fifth of all healthcare spending in that group. One person, 20% of spending – that is how skewed healthcare consumption is in this country. Here’s a picture, which…