Need I say more?
Insurers can use behavioral economics, which examines why people make certain decisions and then determines how to influence said decisions, to compel members to improve their health, according to research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “I don’t think there’s any question that behavioral economics approaches have a lot of potential to contribute to healthcare,”…
“Specialty drugs” – that’s what they’re called. Not the pills of old, these pharmaceuticals are often given intravenously or through injection. Often more biologic in their synthesis than chemical, they are expensive to produce and often target narrow disease processes, meaning the number of patients likely to benefit from them is much much smaller than,…
It is hard for any physician to advance as a medical researcher. Competition for research funding is fierce; the rigors of publishing in prestigious medical journals are gargantuan. And women pursuing such careers face even bigger challenges, with many having to take on disproportionate burdens at home compared to their male colleagues (caring for kids,…
NPR’s Planet Money published two excellent graphs this week, comparing health care spending in the US now versus the 70s and 90s. For example, here’s what they reveal about hospital versus non-hospital spending: In other words, hospitals have a shrinking proportion of the health care dollar, but not one that is shrinking very much. Despite…
I am going to be writing about chronic pain: diagnosis, treatment, mistreatment, etc, in upcoming posts. In my first post, i describe part of my own pain journey. The post is here. And it starts with me standing “in the back of the conference hall panicked that I was going blind.”
For more than half a century now, the United States has stood out among its peers in the developed world for having the largest percent of its citizens living without health insurance. But once you turn 65-years-old in America, the government has you covered. Right? Maybe not so much. Because even after people enroll in,…