Welcome to Massachusetts, Coverage for All, Doctors for Few

Actually, my title is a bit misleading.  Not everyone has coverage…many people have not complied with the new law mandating coverage, and simply pay the fines.  So the state still has many uninsured people, and now it has a rising shortage of primary care physicians.
Those of us who have taken a basic economics course saw [...]

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Medical Tourism

Medical Tourism isn’t like regular tourism.  It’s a euphemism for traveling to a foreign country for more affordable medical care.  And with skyrocketing health care costs in the United States, it’s becoming a reality.  Thomas Black of Bloomberg News writes that insurance companies are now offering plans that include procedures in foreign countries, in exchange [...]

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Consumerism Cheapening Health Care? Get Over It…

People like to scoff at the idea of blending health care with shopping.  Uttering the very words “consumer driven health care” sends shivers down the spines of “purists” – your local medical specialist, whose life-saving work necessitates the confidence and ego driving the indignancy of the thought.  Does consumerism cheapen health care?  Well, yes…if you [...]

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Who Chooses Your Surgeon, You or Someone You’ve Never Met?

Journalists Ezra Klein and Peter Suderman debate the government’s role in the future of U.S. Health Care (thank you Healthcare Economist).  Whose argument carries more weight?
Klein’s main argument is decidedly anti-libertarian, which makes perfect sense because I don’t think he is a Libertarian.  Klein’s conclusion is that it will take substantial government resources, research and [...]

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I Might Have Been Wrong About Obesity…

I frequently make a big deal about obesity – how it’s probably one of the primary reasons Americans have comparatively low life expectancies, and how it contributes largely (no-pun intended) to our skyrocketing health care costs.  My generalizations are imprecise at best…just plain wrong at worst. 
Check out this Q and A with health economist Eric [...]

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Health Care Coverage for 40 Million Uninsured Without Raising Taxes

A solution for America’s uninsured always seems financially unsustainable.  Sure, other countries have it, but they don’t have 300 million people, vast disparities in household incomes and general wealth, a third-world country next-door neighbor with a broken fence latch, and a military.
Well, thanks to the embarassing inefficiencies present in our current health care system, the [...]

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The Number One Culprit in Modern Medicine: Guesswork

The Crossover Health blog has fantastic commentary on Shannon Brownlee’s book “Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making us Sicker and Poorer.”  I haven’t read the book, but I understand it’s about waste in American Health Care.  The blog focuses on one particular chapter entitled “The Desperate Cure,” which chronicles the failure of Bone Marrow [...]

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9th Circuit Drives Small Business Owners out of San Francisco

The title of this post is a prediction rather than a description.  The New York Times reports that a three judge panel from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the city of San Francisco, CA a temporary reprieve from a lower court ruling that would’ve prevented the city from forcing small business owners [...]

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Hospitals Will Have to Pay for Mistakes

Vanessa Fuhrmans of the Wall Street Journal reports that insurance companies are probably going to stop paying for medical treatments made necessary by “never-events,” (list from the National Quality Forum) those major screw-ups you pray a hospital never commits.  Examples include leaving a sponge in a surgery patient, amputating the wrong limb, transfusing the wrong [...]

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It’s Not All or Nothing…

When we make snap judgments based on race, creed, religion, or gender, we are bigots.  When a Wall Street trader makes a snap judgment, he can either make or lose a lot of money.  The latter probably more closely resembles the original reason for the adaptation.  Long ago in our development, making judgments that [...]

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