Next week, Time magazine features a cover story that it says is “the longest single piece ever published by a single writer” in the magazine. Entitled "Bitter Pill: Why...
Category: health care costs
Next week, Time magazine features a cover story that it says is “the longest single piece ever published by a single writer” in the magazine. Entitled "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us," it is an exhaustive, morbidly fascinating, and ultimately deeply discouraging story about the almost unimaginable financial excesses and distortions in the U.S. health care industry.
It was written by Steven Brill, a journalist, lawyer, and entrepreneur and the founder of Court TV, American Lawyer , and Brill's Content. Brill's most recent book was Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (2011). ...
While politicians debate how to avoid falling off the fiscal cliff that they created themselves, not many people are talking about smart ways to lower health care costs.
The idea most often mentioned in recent days is that the U.S. should raise the age when people become eligible for Medicare. It's a...
While politicians debate how to avoid falling off the fiscal cliff that they created themselves, not many people are talking about smart ways to lower health care costs.
The idea most often mentioned in recent days is that the U.S. should raise the age when people become eligible for Medicare. It's a tactic that even the least thoughtful member of Congress can understand--save money by denying care to millions of people. Easy for Washington to understand, but maybe not so easy to understand for those millions who are denied care.
Such a crude move seems foolish in light of the years of research that have shown many, many ways to lower health care costs intelligently, with far fewer adverse consequences. You can find hundreds of such studies and proposals in the journal Health Affairs and in many other medical and scholarly journals. To take one example, the current issue of Health Affairs features a study...
We've heard the statistic before, but it's useful to be reminded of the exact numbers:
Medicare costs are already expected to reach $830 billion a year by 2017. About one-quarter -- or $208 billion -- will be spent on people in the final year of their lives.
And what...
We've heard the statistic before, but it's useful to be reminded of the exact numbers:
Medicare costs are already expected to reach $830 billion a year by 2017. About one-quarter -- or $208 billion -- will be spent on people in the final year of their lives.
And what will that exorbitantly expensive care do? In many cases, not much. And sometimes it will hurt more than help.
The statistic comes from "The Cost of Dying: Simple act of feeding poses painful choices," by Lisa M. Krieger at the San Jose Mercury News. The piece is about a very small piece of medical equipment, so simple and common that we rarely stop to give it much thought--the feeding tube. It is used on one-third of demented nursing home residents who have forgotten how to eat, Krieger reports...
24Oct 2012
"In most areas of the economy," writes James Surowiecki in the Oct. 29 issue of The New Yorker, "free market principles insure that products and services keep...
"In most areas of the economy," writes James Surowiecki in the Oct. 29 issue of The New Yorker, "free market principles insure that products and services keep improving, and that consumers get better and better deals." Yesterday's announcement by Apple of new and better products, some at the same prices as their now-obsolete predecessors, is an example.
But in this excellent, brief analysis of health care reform, he notes that the free market "falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy," and he points to what he says is a classic article published by Kenneth Arrow nearly 50 years ago. [That's my link, not his, and I think it's correct; he should have linked to the article himself.] Among other things,...
I've just finished the best story on health care that I expect to read this year--unless its author, Atul Gawande, decides to write another one.
In a piece in the current issue of ...
I've just finished the best story on health care that I expect to read this year--unless its author, Atul Gawande, decides to write another one.
In a piece in the current issue of The New Yorker, Gawande begins in an unlikely setting--at dinner on a Saturday night at The Cheesecake Factory with his two teenage daughters and three of their friends. He marvels at the restaurant. It has something for everyone--wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, and Bud Light and buffalo wings. The food is inexpensive, the place is packed, the atmosphere is Disney-like, and the staff is neatly dressed and attentive. "As for the food--can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?--it was delicious," Gawande writes.
Expensive restaurants serve as test kitchens for the restaurant chains, he writes, and some of the best...
"There are really only two ways to make Medicare cost less: Pay health care...
"There are really only two ways to make Medicare cost less: Pay health care providers like doctors and hospitals less, or make Medicare patients pay more."
That was reporter Julie Rovner on NPR today. Really? That's it? Let's take a look...
Rovner, a reporter whose work I generally admire, seems to have missed something in this story. And perhaps it's because she told the story in distressingly typical Washington fashion: Not he says-she says, but Democrat says-Republican says.
Relying on partisans to give us predictably partisan opinions is rarely going to get a reporter anywhere...
"Methylmercury Cuts Could Save the U.S. Millions of Dollars,"...
"Methylmercury Cuts Could Save the U.S. Millions of Dollars," says a recent headline in Chemical & Engineering News.
The reason? Mostly that reducing mercury in the environment could reduce the number of heart attacks.
Sounds good--I vote yes! Or I would have, if I hadn't kept reading...
Writer Naomi Lubick starts backpedalling even before the ink is dry on the lede. The connection between mercury and heart attacks "remains weak," she writes, because "the studies relied on small sample sizes." If mercury doesn't cause heart attacks--and we're apparently far from confirming it--then methylmercury cuts could...
You might call it death from a thousand questions.
The New York Times, in...
You might call it death from a thousand questions.
The New York Times, in a front-page story today, tries to punch a large investigative hole through the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which shows "where the waste is in medicine," according to one of its authors.
Reporters Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris evidently think they have written a story that says the data used to identify potential health savings in Medicare is faulty. They haven't.
Their bias is evident from the start. They describe the study in the lede as coming from "a once obscure research group" at Dartmouth. You see how clever that is?...
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