Rural hospitals have been closing at alarming rates, no longer able to bring in enough revenue to serve their communities. Fortunately, there is something both state and federal legislators can do to keep local hospitals open. State governments: if you haven’t expanded Medicaid, do it now. Under the Affordable Care Act, most of the cost of that…
In a recent report from the IOM, the US comes in with surprisingly low life expectancy compared to other developed countries. Take, for instance, this picture from USA Today, showing life expectancy for women:
At the same time, we spend WAY MORE on health care than any of our peers. No one is even a close second. Does that mean our spending is not yielding appropriate results? Those of you who follow my writing (I’m talking to BOTH of you) know that I have serious concerns about health care spending in the US. But keep in mind, that life expectancy is a TERRIBLE measure of health care quality…(Read more here)
Thought I’d pass along a simple picture showing the results of Medicare efforts to reduce hospital readmissions. To their credit, the folks of Medicare are not sure what will work, so they have been pilot testing lots of programs. But as this picture from a January 2012 Congressional Budget Office briefing shows, there is wide variability…
Recently, I wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Timescalling upon physicians to discuss out-of-pocket costs with their patients before making medical decisions, and urging patients to take matters into their own hands if their physicians fail to initiate such conversations. This Op-Ed closely mirrored an argument I made in the New England Journal of Medicine with my colleagues Yousuf Zafar and Amy…
See this great piece by a reporter at Forbes discussing why rare disease treatments can cost as much as $400,000 per patient, per year. You will get a glimpse of my take on this topic too, but I plan on writing more about it in the future.
A new report out of Massachusetts concludes that people there are paying more for their health insurance, at the same time that the services covered by their insurance are declining. Here’s a picture from a Kaiser summary of the report: The Kaiser story also points out that a big problem in Massachusetts is that people…
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