Elizabeth Warren describes medical bills as “the leading cause of personal bankruptcy” in the United States. She bases that opinion in part on her own research, in which she and her collaborators surveyed people who had experienced personal bankruptcy, asked them whether they’d experienced health-related financial distress, and concluded that 60% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. result…
My student and colleague, Karen Scherr, recently published an excellent article showing that physicians don’t always describe robotic surgery in an unbiased manner. Here is a nice write up of that work: Author Peter Ubel referred to a study done at four Veterans Affairs medical centers of men making decisions on how best to treat…
A JAMA study shows that even though Americans are eating more nuts and whole grains than they used to (see previous post), they aren’t coming CLOSE to meeting dietary requirements: Changing what people eat takes a long time!
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…
Donald Trump says he can improve upon the Affordable Care Act – promising to get everyone in the country “a much better healthcare plan at much lower cost.” If that’s really what Trump wants to do, he should pay attention to one of the problems with Obamacare – the subsidies to purchase insurance might have…
A recent economic analysis concluded that patients with metastatic cancer value their treatments significantly more than regulators recognize, with many expensive new therapies looking like veritable bargains to most patients.
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