Take a look at the image below and decide what you are seeing: Some of you might have seen a “B.” Others might have seen the number 13. The image, after all, is ambiguous. For that reason, in fact, it was used by researchers to study how our hopes influence our perceptions. The study design…
Bret Stephens won a Pulitzer Prize for his foreign affairs column in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Only in his early 40s, Stephens can already boast of an enviable number of accomplishments. He has already been Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post. And he is now Deputy Editor at the Wall Street Journal, one of…
For a while last fall, it looked like the Obamacare health insurance exchanges were spinning towards a death spiral. Enrollment in the health insurance exchanges was not growing as rapidly as many people had hoped. United Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest insurers, announced that it intended to pull out of the exchanges soon, convinced…
Usually it costs money to get an MRI. But sometimes, in order to save money, insurance companies pay patients to seek less expensive medical care providers. Here is an excellent news report on the topic from The News & Observer: North Carolina’s largest health insurer is proposing a solution to control runaway health care costs:…
An interesting article by Peter Schwartz in the latest Hastings Center Report on whether patients, facing difficult medical decisions, ought to get precise numbers on the risks and benefits of their alternatives. I contributed a commentary, urging researchers to keep developing better ways to help patients make rational use of the numbers.
I recently spoke with Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times. She’s an awesome healthcare reporter. She wrote a nice piece on some recent nudging research. Here’s the beginning of the article to whet your appetite: The letters doctors received from the county medical examiner included a shocking fact: A patient you once prescribed an…