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Employers Are Doing a Terrible Job of Covering the Cost of Pregnancy
If you get insurance through your employer, you don’t have to worry about whether insurance will cover maternity care. The company is required to do so by law. But that doesn’t mean the insurer will be very generous. Because in the United States, having coverage doesn’t mean you’re well-covered. Employers are increasingly corralling their employees into high…
The Life-Expectancy Gap in One Depressing Picture
Here, from the Financial Times, is a picture showing that the lower your income, the less increase you’ve gotten in life-expectancy the last four decades: Income inequality is one of the largest human problems of this century.
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….
Are Insurance Companies the Key to Lower Prices?
Two patients lie asleep on operating room tables, each with an inflamed appendix demanding to be relocated to a specimen jar. Two operations take place, each one lasting close to fifty minutes, each one performed by an experienced surgeon at a state-of-the-art U.S. hospital. One operation was priced at $1200 dollars. But the other one…
How to Stop Over-Eating — Lessons from Brain Science
Put our brains into the modern food environment, and you have a recipe for disaster. Our brains are hardwired to crave calorie-dense foods, this craving no doubt arising from our evolutionary time spent on the Tundra where calories were often scarce. But our modern food environment surrounds us with calorie-dense foods, forcing us to deplete…
Price Transparency Thoughts from a Thought Leader (And Former Student)
Here is a great piece on my former student, Jessica Harris, who now works in health care price transparency at Aetna. She visited my class this summer, and here are some of the things she taught them: The evolution of transparency in the industry: “2013 and 2014 have been really important years for transparency and…