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Come Work With Us!
Our Medical Decision Making Research Group is looking for an Associate in Research to join our team. Please see the job description below and the link to apply. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Associate in Research (RA) will support investigators on multiple research projects related to patient decision making and health communication. The RA will contribute to the…
At Risk of Financial Ruin
According to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the best sources of reliable health policy information, the majority of Americans will have to exhaust all their “liquid assets” to cover medical expenses, if they reach the maximum out-of-pocket costs allowed by their health insurance. The moral of this story is simple: stay healthy!
The Primary Care Doctor Is Not In
In a clever study, secret shoppers called primary care offices in an attempt to make a new patient appointment. People with Obamacare insurance, or “marketplace plans” in the below figure, had a hard time finding appointments. But so did people with traditional insurance. But there’s a bigger takeaway, one slightly obscured by the misleading y-axis,…
When It Came to Medicare Costs LBJ Concluded "What's $400 Million Between Friends!"
Lyndon Johnson’s advisers were worried. They were drafting a Medicare proposal, a major component of Johnson’s war on poverty. But the cost of this program was turning out to be much larger than expected. By their estimates, in the first year alone, they would face $400 million more in expenditures than they had budgeted for….
Solving the Primary Care Physician Shortage by Turning PCPs into Anesthesiologists
Are there really too few primary care physicians? And if so, what can we do to solve the PCP shortage? The standard answer to the first question is “yes, we have too few PCPs.” And the standard solution is to train more such docs, or allow more foreign-trained primary care docs into the country or,…
Physicians Can't Stop Overtreating Diabetes And Hypertension
Aggressive control of blood pressure has saved millions of lives, and has prevented millions of people from experiencing heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure, among other things. Admittedly, controlling blood pressure is not the sexy part of medical care, but when primary care doctors like me help people get their blood pressure under control, we…