The Critical Side Effect Doctors Aren't Discussing: Out-of-Pocket Costs
In this video, I talk about why doctors should talk to patients about out-of-pocket costs when evaluating treatment options.
In this video, I talk about why doctors should talk to patients about out-of-pocket costs when evaluating treatment options.
The state of California is suing Gilead Sciences over its delay of an HIV drug, a move that critics of the pharmaceutical industry call “product hopping.” Regardless of how the lawsuit comes out, the company’s actions strike me as deeply immoral and ought to leave all of us hopping mad. Here’s what we know.
I want to share a wonderful blog post with you, written by one of “my” students, Laura Mortimer – a student in the Masters in Public Policy program at the Sanford School at Duke, who also happens to be a talented writer. In linking to her post, and then calling her my student, I of course…
Recently, Dr. R. Adams Dudley, director of the UCSF Center for Healthcare Value, circulated a picture illustrating rapid growth in the use of tests and other imaging procedures between 2000 and 2013. I thought it deserved further circulation. It reveals 60-80% expansion of testing and imaging, with only – only? – a 40% increase in…
Ten years ago, my tennis partner suffered a stroke. He was a sixty-year-old at the time, working to move up into the top ten players in his age group. In the country! You could not have found a healthier sixty-year-old. He played tennis three-plus hours a day, scampering across the court like a hyperactive adolescent. …
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. …
Last time I checked, the mouth was still part of the human body. If I remember correctly, when people experience mouth problems, they ache just as much (often more) than if they experienced problems elsewhere in their bodies. So why do we still treat care of the mouth differently than other types of medical care?…