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How To Trick People Into Caring About Healthcare
In health policy circles (yes, those exist!), experts often refer to three aims for a modern healthcare system – to offer (1) universal access to (2) high quality medical care at (3) an affordable...
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How Good is Healthcare in Your Country?
Here is an interesting picture of how people rate the quality of care in their countries. The US is near the top, but so too is the largely socialized British system: One clear message here: We all...
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Health Insurance Prices Declining under Obamacare
One year does not a trend make, but it does look like prices for health insurance under Obamacare next year will decline, on average. Ezra Klein, over at Vox.com, produced a nice picture of these...
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Healthcare Versus Other Social Spending
Here is another great picture from the people at Vox. It shows the United States in the middle of OECD countries, when it comes to spending on social services, like healthcare, unemployment, and the...
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What’s Really Scary about Obamacare
This cartoon made the rounds of twitter a few weeks ago, and was first brought to my attention by Timothy McBride (@mcbridetd). But it is such an entertaining cartoon, I thought I would circulate it...
View ArticleCould Pay-For-Performance Lead To Overuse Of Antibiotics?
Not long ago, the Joint Commission (a healthcare quality organization) established that patients with pneumonia should receive antibiotics within four hours of diagnosis. Timely diagnosis and treatment...
View ArticleDon’t Blame Obamacare for Health Insurance Turnover
When the health insurance exchanges began operating last year, critics complained that people were being forced out of their insurance plans. They correctly pointed out that Obama was mistaken to...
View ArticleRacial Disparities and Outcomes after Heart Attack Were Eliminated by Free...
High costs make it hard for many patients to afford their medications. That’s why some medical experts believe we should give important medications to patients for free, to see if that improves their...
View ArticleHow Medicare Is Punishing Hospitals That Care For Poor People
Such a no-brainer: If patients who receive care at Hospital A are more likely to get readmitted to the hospital 10, 20 or 30 days after discharge than patients in Hospital B, then Hospital A must be...
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Here’s Why Funding Medical Education Helps Vulnerable Patients
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in June (no one accused me of being a timely blogger!) shows that academic medical centers often provide poorly-reimbursed services that other...
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Outpatient Spending Is Catching Up To Hospital Expenditures
For decades now, policymakers have been trying to slow down the growth of healthcare costs. For much of this time, a large part of that effort was directed at hospital spending. American hospitals are...
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What Jonathan Gruber Didn’t Say About Obamacare
Jonathan Gruber went from unknown to infamous in the last few weeks, a result of disparaging comments he made about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and even more disparaging ones he made about...
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Medicaid Expansion is Good for Hospitals
The ever reliable Sarah Kliff recently posted a nice graphic, showing a dramatic decline in the number of hospital visits for which hospitals received little to no money, because the patients have no...
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How Generously Does Your State Reimburse for Medicaid?
A while ago, I wrote a post on how hard it can be for Medicaid recipients to get medical appointments, because so many physicians limit the number of Medicaid patients they see. They limit the number...
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Is Healthcare Spending About To Accelerate?
Bend a resilient object and it will spring back with a vengeance once released from your grip. Is that what is about to happen to healthcare spending? For years now, experts have been debating ways to...
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Health Insurance Is About Financial Security Too
People like me, trained to be physicians, have pushed hard to promote health insurance in the United States because we believe, with some evidence to back up our claims, that good health insurance...
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Your New Liver Is Only A Learjet Away: First Of Three Parts
Photo Credit: OrganJet The forty million dollar Gulfstream jet landed at Memphis International airport in the early morning hours, its schedule hastily arranged earlier that day from Northern...
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