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Where You Live in America Determines When You Die
Shutterstock Debates over income inequality divide liberals and conservatives. In the last few decades, income inequality has soared in the U.S. In the 1950s, the top 1% of Americans brought home about a tenth of the country’s income. By 2012, those 1%’ers accounted for almost a quarter. Only a minority of Republicans are troubled by…
Action Movies Create Couch Potatoes
ICYMI: When people watch action movies, they consume more calories.
Why It's Not Time For Health Care Rationing
In the last few years, the U.S. health care system has seemingly been gripped by “back to the nineties” fever. Back then, we had a Democratic president working to reform the health care system. Experts from across this system were promoting the importance of controlling health care costs; the growth of health care expenditures even…
The Greediest Companies In American Healthcare Are Not Who You Think
There’s plenty of price gouging in American healthcare. The pharmaceutical industry has gotten plenty of (well deserved) bad press for its pricing practices. At the extreme are people like “Pharma Bro” (and convicted felon) Martin Shkreli, who hiked the price of an important medication to treat infections in AIDS patients by over 5000%. But high and…
Influencing Young Minds
I really like teaching Duke undergraduates. They are an ambitious and intelligent group. But sometimes their ambition and intelligence get in the way of creative thinking, especially in regards to careers. They all want to remain high achievers, so they know they must either become doctors, lawyers, investment bankers or business consultants. Not infrequently I…
Will Lowering The Price Of Genetic Testing Raise The Cost Of Medical Care?
The first time scientists sequenced a person’s entire genome, it took more than a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently, such sequencing takes less than twenty-four hours and costs less than $5,000: To put that into perspective, Myriad Genetics charges $3,000 to test for mutations in just two genes associated with breast…