Here is a nice piece in the Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke, on price transparency in medical care. You know when UNDERGRADS start writing about a topic, it is hot! (Click here to view comments)
Confused about whether you will need to buy health insurance under the Obamacare mandate? Here is a chart from the Kaiser Foundation Family website that helps you sort things through: (Click here to view comments)
As you know from a couple of my earlier posts, I am exploring the ins and outs of price transparency in health care. Here is a nice post by William Pierce in the Huffington Post that pulls together a number of nice links while musing about the complexities of this issue. Pierce’s post makes mention…
Here is video from a talk I recently gave at the University of Wisconsin, laying out a few of the reasons I think the government needs to play a role in combating the obesity epidemic. If you dig further into the conference website, you will see a video from my opponent in the debate, Jacob…
Any effort to rein in health care costs needs to account for this graph, showing what percent of medical expenses attributed which group of patients. (Martin Gaynor posted this picture in a recent blog.) I use another version of this in my teaching: Either way, what we have here is an AMAZING concentration of spending….
In a recent Washington Post article, Sarah Kliff reported that “Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients” because of reductions in reimbursement caused by the sequester. Specifically, oncologists will no longer be able to markup the price of chemotherapy by 6% “to cover the cost of storing and administering” the drugs….
Getting your appendix out can cost between $2,000 and $180,000. Hip replacements run from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Hospitals, we have also learned, frequently mark up the price of cotton swabs and routine X-rays by 300 or 400 percent, with most patients oblivious to the reason their health care bills are so large. As a response to…
Here is a very interesting picture from the Atlantic website, charting the unpredictability of healthcare costs. The picture was put into the article in large part to point out how hard it is to estimate how much healthcare costs will grow over time. And certainly, the up-and-down roller coaster like quality of this picture is…
Now that states have decided what they are going to do about health insurance exchanges—those new shopping carts created by Obamacare to help consumers find health insurance who do not get it through their employers—the really tough part begins. State and federal governments need to make sure that consumers understand their health insurance choices. You…
In a 2011 JAMA article, Gil Welch and colleagues looked at how many chronic diseases Medicare enrollees had across different regions of the country. They came up with the following picture: This picture may confirm some of your suspicions. For example, elderly in the north are sicker than ones in, say, Arizona or Southern Florida,…