Health Insurance Trends in One Picture
Here is data from the CDC, on the percent of Americans without health insurance. It shows that Obamacare, for all its strengths and weaknesses, is definitely addressing one major problem in the US:
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Obamacare Going into a Death Spiral?
Folks around the country are signing up for health insurance right now on the Obamacare exchanges, and some are seeing a very confusing set of options, with price hikes, or maybe not price hikes, and with subsidies, or maybe not such generous subsidies. Here is a great take on what’s happening in NC: Obamacare Customers…
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Unnecessarily Uninsured
This picture, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows that many people who lack health insurance in the United States right now are actually eligible for either Medicaid or federally subsidized private insurance.
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What Physicians Can Learn from Veterinarians
A while back, I linked to a story by Rebecca Plevin, out of California Public Radio, on the challenge of discussing health care costs. Well, she has tuned up that piece and placed it on Marketplace. Here is a print version: When a doctor prescribes a medication, most of us don’t ask how much it’ll…
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When It Comes to Controlling Healthcare Costs, the Government Outperforms Private Industry
When I think of the federal government, “efficiency” is rarely the first thing on my mind. But when it comes to controlling healthcare costs, we need to consider the possibility that the federal government is better at this job than anyone else. Consider the fact that the United States dwarfs other countries in healthcare spending,…
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Health Insurance Is About Financial Security Too
People like me, trained to be physicians, have pushed hard to promote health insurance in the United States because we believe, with some evidence to back up our claims, that good health insurance promotes better health. When people don’t have insurance, they delay necessary medical care for too long, and their health suffers as a…
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The High Price of Affordable Medicine
In the old days, blockbuster drugs were moderately expensive pills taken by hundreds of thousands of patients. Think blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes pills. But today, many blockbusters are designed to target much less common diseases, illnesses like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis or even specific subcategories of cancer. These medications have become blockbusters not…
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Healthcare.gov 3.0–Improving the Design of the Obamacare Exchanges
I joined two other, much smarter, colleagues in calling for the use of behavioral economics and decision psychology to improve the design of the websites people use to purchase health insurance in the U.S. That article came out today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here is a taste: In October 2013, the Affordable…
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Obamacare 2.0—Better than Version 1.0?
Paige Rentz, an excellent reporter at the Fayetteville Observer, recently posted a question and answer piece, exploring some of the pressing issues facing the second round of insurance enrollment, on the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. I suggest you look at the entire article. But here is a snippet: What’s at stake? Last year, North Carolina…
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Don't Blame Obamacare for Health Insurance Turnover
When the health insurance exchanges began operating last year, critics complained that people were being forced out of their insurance plans. They correctly pointed out that Obama was mistaken to promise that “if you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your plan.” Obama’s promise was wrong not because the Affordable Care…