Imagine you are a small business owner deciding whether to hire two new employees, your 50th and 51st workers respectively. Would you hire them knowing that, by surpassing the magic number 50, you will now be obligated under Obamacare to pay a penalty unless you offer all your employees affordable healthcare insurance? Imagine you are owner of…
If you have been paying attention to US healthcare policy debates lately, you know that hospitals have a price problem. Walk across the street from one hospital to a competitor hospital, and you could easily find yourself facing a $30,000 increase in your medical bills. At one extreme for instance recent information shows that replacing your hip…
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…
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)
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…
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…
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…
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…
Recently, I posted in Forbes about our need to rethink primary care, to avoid a physician shortage. The debate continues, as seen in this interesting post from Dan Diamond. (Click here to view comments)
Are there really too few primary care physicians? And if so, what can we do to solve the PCP shortage? The standard answer to the first question is “yes, we have too few PCPs.” And the standard solution is to train more such docs, or allow more foreign-trained primary care docs into the country or,…