In this Marketplace report, Dan Gorenstein explores the role procrastination played in all the last minute efforts to sign up for health insurance through Obamacare this year. Read on to see how I managed to work “the Boss” into the story. Updated Monday, Dec. 23: The Obama administration announced on Monday it was giving a one-day…
In a recent post, I wrote about ethnic variation in the likelihood of going without health insurance. There’s also quite a bit of geographic variation in uninsurance, based on 2008 data – before the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Here is a picture showing the percentage of people in the continental United States who…
Recently, I wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Timescalling upon physicians to discuss out-of-pocket costs with their patients before making medical decisions, and urging patients to take matters into their own hands if their physicians fail to initiate such conversations. This Op-Ed closely mirrored an argument I made in the New England Journal of Medicine with my colleagues Yousuf Zafar and Amy…
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…