As part of Obamacare, people are required to get health insurance or pay a penalty. That’s what’s known infamously as the individual mandate. But is the penalty too small to matter? For some people, the penalty might be as low as $95. Would anyone in their right mind, who is not otherwise inclined to buy…
John “Eagle-faced” Raines had a simple goal in mind: put a big hurt into the evil saloon industry that was threatening the moral fabric of late 19th century New York State. Low wage workers were spending huge chunks of their Sundays (for many, the only day of their weekend) tipping pints at dingy saloons, when…
Thought I’d pass along a simple picture showing the results of Medicare efforts to reduce hospital readmissions. To their credit, the folks of Medicare are not sure what will work, so they have been pilot testing lots of programs. But as this picture from a January 2012 Congressional Budget Office briefing shows, there is wide variability…
Here is a nice piece in the Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke, on price transparency in medical care. You know when UNDERGRADS start writing about a topic, it is hot! (Click here to view comments)
Confused about whether you will need to buy health insurance under the Obamacare mandate? Here is a chart from the Kaiser Foundation Family website that helps you sort things through: (Click here to view comments)
As you know from a couple of my earlier posts, I am exploring the ins and outs of price transparency in health care. Here is a nice post by William Pierce in the Huffington Post that pulls together a number of nice links while musing about the complexities of this issue. Pierce’s post makes mention…
Here is video from a talk I recently gave at the University of Wisconsin, laying out a few of the reasons I think the government needs to play a role in combating the obesity epidemic. If you dig further into the conference website, you will see a video from my opponent in the debate, Jacob…
Any effort to rein in health care costs needs to account for this graph, showing what percent of medical expenses attributed which group of patients. (Martin Gaynor posted this picture in a recent blog.) I use another version of this in my teaching: Either way, what we have here is an AMAZING concentration of spending….
In a recent Washington Post article, Sarah Kliff reported that “Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients” because of reductions in reimbursement caused by the sequester. Specifically, oncologists will no longer be able to markup the price of chemotherapy by 6% “to cover the cost of storing and administering” the drugs….
Getting your appendix out can cost between $2,000 and $180,000. Hip replacements run from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Hospitals, we have also learned, frequently mark up the price of cotton swabs and routine X-rays by 300 or 400 percent, with most patients oblivious to the reason their health care bills are so large. As a response to…