What Does Health Insurance Consolidation Mean for You?
Listen to this Marketplace report on consolidation in the world of health insurance. It is an interesting report, and also the first public acknowledgment that I am, gulp, a Business Professor!
Listen to this Marketplace report on consolidation in the world of health insurance. It is an interesting report, and also the first public acknowledgment that I am, gulp, a Business Professor!
Knee replacements are booming. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of knee replacement procedures in the United States doubled, to more than one million. Experts think the figure might rise sixfold more in the next couple decades, because of our aging population. Since many people receiving knee replacements are elderly, Medicare picks up most of…
A fascinating study from JAMA Internal Medicine shows that hospital mortality rates decline when hospitals are being inspected by The Joint Commission, a national accrediting agency. Here’s a picture showing the research findings: Which raises the question – is there a way for hospitals to be vigilant even when they aren’t being inspected?
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…
Physicians need to broach discussions about out-of-pocket costs with patients the same way they discuss a treatment’s side effects, public policy professors wrote. “Admittedly, out-of-pocket costs are difficult to predict, but so are many medical outcomes that are nevertheless included in clinical discussions,” Peter Ubel, MD, of Duke University’s School of Public Policy, and colleagues wrote….
A recent Gallup poll shows that the percent of Americans without health insurance has dropped significantly in recent months. Here’s a picture of their findings: This drop has occurred largely in response to Obamacare – to the expansion of Medicaid in those states which went along with that provision of the law, and with the…
A new study asks Orthopedic surgeons to guess the price of the devices they implant – “the amount your institution currently pays the vendor for the implant.” Despite a lenient grading system, in which the researchers counted as correct any guess within 20% of the actual price, surgeons estimated costs correctly only 1 in 5…