Many Americans are buying healthcare insurance that asks them to pay a lot, out-of-pocket, for the care they receive. It looks like that trend, towards higher expenses, is especially common among higher income folks, as shown by this picture courtesy of the Commonwealth Fund:
If you are wondering why your hourly wage or your salary aren’t rising as quickly as you like, or why your bank account at the end of the year hasn’t grown as much as you intended, don’t forget to take into account just how much more you are probably paying out-of-pocket for the medical care…
Here’s a picture from the Kaiser Family Foundation from late last year, showing what people want done to improve the US healthcare system: Plenty of work to do!
I had the great pleasure of talking about out-of-pocket healthcare costs at Periodic Tables: Durham’s Science Café, a speaker series run by The Program for Science and Society at Duke University. The crowd was absolutely awesome, and much larger than I expected, given that I was speaking at the same time that Duke’s number one…
Here is a nice story from a NC news station explaining the turmoil in the exchanges, with Aetna pulling out of many markets. Worth a quick read. North Carolina consumers buying broadly subsidized health insurance policies on the online marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act will have fewer options after a major insurer pulls…
Here is a chart from the Washington Post, showing the percent of people lacking health insurance over the last few years. For a long time now, a higher proportion of Democrats have been uninsured than Republicans, with low income and minority communities experiencing a disproportionately high uninsurance rate. But since Obamacare has come into effect,…
A study shows that a medication causes more harms than benefits, and physicians like me keep prescribing the pill anyway, either because we don’t learn about the study, don’t believe the study or are simply stuck in our ways. Even professionals have a hard time breaking bad habits. So what do you think happened when…