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…
Here is a very interesting picture from the Atlantic website, charting the unpredictability of healthcare costs. The picture was put into the article in large part to point out how hard it is to estimate how much healthcare costs will grow over time. And certainly, the up-and-down roller coaster like quality of this picture is…
Now that states have decided what they are going to do about health insurance exchanges—those new shopping carts created by Obamacare to help consumers find health insurance who do not get it through their employers—the really tough part begins. State and federal governments need to make sure that consumers understand their health insurance choices. You…
In a 2011 JAMA article, Gil Welch and colleagues looked at how many chronic diseases Medicare enrollees had across different regions of the country. They came up with the following picture: This picture may confirm some of your suspicions. For example, elderly in the north are sicker than ones in, say, Arizona or Southern Florida,…
Lost in all the confusion about Obamacare is the fact that the law relies on more than just the individual mandate to encourage people to buy health insurance. It also makes health insurance more affordable, especially for people at or below 400% of the federal poverty limit by subsidizing insurance for those folks. So do…
Recently, Congressman Paul Ryan put together another budget balancing proposal. It has received a lot of attention in the news, even though it is as likely to be enacted as is the Senate Democrat alternative– in other words, it won’t be enacted. Nevertheless, for those of you interested in healthcare and healthcare policy, here’s a…
According to a recent Forbes post: “A huge pay raise promised under the Affordable Care Act for primary care doctors who treat the nation’s poor covered by Medicaid health insurance is nearly three months behind schedule and may take another three months before it kicks in.” I suggest you look at the entire essay, because…
Although blocked for now, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Soda Ban has many wondering what tactics could actually help consumers kick certain bad habits? Threats? Pricing? Bans? Graphic images? What actually works and what role should the government play? I recently had the pleasure of participating in a discussion addressing all these questions. Listen to…
When Johnson was pushing congress to establish the nation’s first real health care funding, many legislators, especially conservative southern Democrats, balked at the cost. Johnson was well aware that Medicare would be costly. But he thought health insurance was too important, in reducing poverty among elderly people, to let costs get in the way. He…
In a New England Journal of Medicine article from November 18, 2010, Zhang and colleagues map out rates of what are arguably inappropriate prescriptions. For instance this picture shows rates of high risk drugs in Medicare recipients, drugs like Valium (and its cousins) which are known to cause falls and other complications: This picture shows that WHERE…