In my previous post, I showed a powerful picture (from the Kaiser Family Foundation) of the growth in high deductible insurance plans. Here is another picture from that same report, showing that the high end of these high ends is getting really high. (Click here to view comments)
With health care costs rising, employers (and insurance companies) are increasingly asking consumers (aka “patients”) to have more “skin in the game”—to pay more out of pocket for their medical care. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice report on trends in health insurance deductibles. This picture shows the rise in these deductibles. That means:…
In her deservedly best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot reproduces the language of Lacks’s informed consent document when she was about to undergoing her cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1951: I hereby give consent to the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anesthetic…
Here is a link to a podcast of my recent appearance on People’s Pharmacy, an NPR show that hopefully reaches you where you live. (If it doesn’t, you should ask your radio station to pick it up. It is a great show.) In this podcast, Joe and Terry lead me on a wide ranging conversation,…
Since the recession hit hard a few years ago, health care expenditures have slowed dramatically. It now looks like, at least for medications, cost increases are making a comeback. For instance: Nexium, a heartburn drug, had a 7.8% price hike to a $262 average prescription in the first nine months of 2012. Enough to make…
Andrews was easily the most anxious patient I took care of that month, a gray Michigan February (is there any other kind?) which I spent in the hospital caring for patients admitted to the general medical ward at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center. (Andrews is a pseudonym, as are all the patients I blog about, unless…
“Revolutions are often fought over dichotomies—the king versus the people, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, and, of course, the autonomous patient versus the paternalistic doctor.” So observes Peter Ubel in the conclusion of Critical Decisions: How You and Your Doctor Can Make the Right Medical Choices Together. Who decides? Doctor or patient? For decades, too…
I got an email recently from someone who read Critical Decisions, and who said it resonated with her in part because of work she does with a breast cancer hot line. “I’ve been volunteering as a Helpline worker for Living Beyond Breast Cancer. We get a lot of calls from women who seem to have…
The first test tube baby was born July 25th, 1978 in the north of England. Louise Brown was called the “baby of the century” by some and a “moral abomination” by others. It wasn’t Brown who critics accused of being immoral, of course. She was just a blameless infant. Instead, it was her doctors who…
As if being diagnosed with breast cancer wasn’t bad enough, many women with this diagnosis face complicated decisions about what kind of medicine or chemotherapy to take, if any, to reduce their chance of cancer recurrence. As I discussed in a recent post, the mathematics of such decisions can be hard to comprehend for many patients. …