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:
Greedy pharma execs have been in the news of late. Here is a story on the topic, from Wired. The reporter misquotes me. I never said Apple could make profits selling iPhones for $10. I said that even if they could profit at that price, they’d be crazy to do so if people would…
According to many conservative pundits, Obamacare is a job killer. Five days before Obama signed the law, in fact, speaker John Boehner declared that the president was pushing “his job killing government takeover of healthcare that will hurt small businesses.” Years after the law was passed, critics continued trumpeting this theme, Ted Cruz calling Obamacare “the biggest job-killer in…
A while back, I wrote a piece in the Hastings Center Report proposing a better way of teaching ethics to professionals, like medical students. I thought such education should be grounded less in philosophy and more in understanding the psychology of our moral behavior. Glad to see that my ideas have been picked up, in…
Shutterstock If you experience a heart attack, you are probably going to need to take pills to prevent another such attack. People who take beta blockers, aspirin, or cholesterol pills after heart attacks are less likely to experience a second such attack. (Note: Don’t take any of these pills until you have spoken to your…
Take a look at the image below and decide what you are seeing: Some of you might have seen a “B.” Others might have seen the number 13. The image, after all, is ambiguous. For that reason, in fact, it was used by researchers to study how our hopes influence our perceptions. The study design…
Shutterstock If you get health insurance through your job, beware: you might be picking up more of the cost of your medical care than you realize. With increasing frequency, employers are directing their workers to the kind of high deductible, high out-of-pocket insurance plans that leave workers financially responsible for a surprising portion of their…