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…
In the April issue of Health Affairs, a group of authors explored the cost-containment strategies and four “high income countries“, and try to see what they were doing that we are currently not doing in the United States. The first picture below, shows all five countries and reveals that, over the last 10 years, only…
I am not a fan of judging the quality of a nation’s healthcare system by examining life expectancy. Many, many factors influence life expectancy that have nothing to do with healthcare. When examining life expectancy in developed countries, for example, all of which have decent healthcare systems, your best bets at predicting differences across countries…
Once again, lots of reports in the news about crazy variation in hospital prices in the United States, with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars difference in the price of services from one hospital to its neighbor across the street. Marketplace did a nice report on this issue recently, including an interview with yours…
There is one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle agree upon: the biggest threat to the future fiscal solvency of the United States is Medicare, the program that pays medical expenses for elderly and disabled Americans. For many years now, the Medicare budget has been growing much faster than the economy as…
On April 14, The United States Preventive Services Taskforce concluded that women with an elevated risk of breast cancer – who have never been diagnosed with breast cancer but whose family history and other medical factors increase their odds of developing the disease–should consider taking one of two pills that cut that risk in half….
It’s comforting to think that most healthcare problems in the U.S. could be solved by letting the power of an unregulated free market do its work. It’s also wishful thinking and overly simplistic, according to Peter Ubel, MD, a general internist, behavioral scientist, and Duke University public policy professor who blogs for Forbes and The…
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…
John “Eagle-faced” Raines had a simple goal in mind: put a big hurt into the evil saloon industry that was threatening the moral fabric of late 19th century New York State. Low wage workers were spending huge chunks of their Sundays (for many, the only day of their weekend) tipping pints at dingy saloons, when…
Thought I’d pass along a simple picture showing the results of Medicare efforts to reduce hospital readmissions. To their credit, the folks of Medicare are not sure what will work, so they have been pilot testing lots of programs. But as this picture from a January 2012 Congressional Budget Office briefing shows, there is wide variability…