I have been writing a lot lately about out-of-pocket costs for health care in United States. In my research on this topic, I came across the following picture, which shows how much insurers are spending on healthcare, among people in the United States receiving insurance through their employers, and also how much those employees are spending…
For years now, the pharmaceutical industry has justified its prices and its profits by reminding us that their products eventually go off patent, and are then offered cheaply to people around the world in generic form. They warned us that the pipeline for new and innovative drugs is less and less promising, because so many…
I have been writing a fair amount lately about the out-of-pocket costs that many Americans face when they receive healthcare services. A new report by The Commonwealth Fund provides a picture of the scope of this issue. It compares the US to 10 other developed countries, and shows not only that people in the US spend…
Obamacare has come under intense criticism for harming businesses, which will see their employee costs rise as a result of the ACA employer mandate. A recent New York Times article reported that complying with Obamacare regulations would “cost about $1 per hour per employee” for agricultural companies paying people to work in the fields. That is a…
It is pretty easy to be against Obamacare these days. The federal government can’t come up with a working website to help people buy health insurance. The President misled people about whether they could hold onto their old insurance plans. And come next tax day, the least popular provision of the Affordable Care Act –…
Here is a discussion I had with Tess Vigeland of Los Angeles Public Radio about the psychology of choosing health plans. (Click here to view comments)
According to the American Action Forum, 43 million American workers will lose access to employer-based health insurance coverage because of Obamacare. Critics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have warned that the creation of health insurance exchanges, and federal subsidies for people earning less than 400% of the federal poverty limit, practically invites employers to stop offering coverage to their employees, so…
In an earlier post, I presented some data on which kind of physicians in the United States are most and least likely to see new patients who receive Medicaid, the state/federal program to pay healthcare costs for low income people. Now a recent study lays out some reasons why many physicians are so reluctant to see such patients….
I teach an undergraduate health policy class at Duke, populated in part by ambitious premeds. (Sorry for that last bit of redundancy.) One of the things I like to emphasize in the class is the kind of medical practice milieu students can expect to encounter when they finally become physicians. That’s a good way to…
I recently learned about a company called OpsCost, which has a very user-friendly website designed to help people figure out how much different hospitals charge for a wide range of treatments and procedures. The company makes use of the data that the Medicare program has recently made available to the general public, and then presents…