Many people have warned us that Obamacare will drive up the cost of healthcare insurance, but recent evidence suggests that the problem is bigger than that. According to the Commonwealth Fund, healthcare insurance costs are rising even more quickly outside of the Obamacare exchanges than inside them:
Here is the opening of an article I recently published in JAMA, available now online, in which I raise concerns about misguided congressional efforts to promote the use of high-value healthcare services, without doing anything to reduce the use of low value ones. Health care systems around the world are under pressure to restrain health…
I was raised in a family that hates taxes. Not hates taxes as in “Gosh, it’s too bad such a high percentage of my paycheck goes to the government.” More like: “How dare the government steal my hard-earned money and give it to undeserving moochers!” (Is there such a thing as a deserving moocher? Sorry,…
“Better Off Not Knowing” – Archives of Internal Medicine
Shutterstock It has become trendy in health policy circles to believe that behavioral economic interventions are the key to health system improvement. After all, traditional economic interventions like pay per performance have generated underwhelming results, with little or no change in physician behavior. Why not try a non-financial, psychological intervention—like performance feedback! Well, a study…
Elizabeth Warren describes medical bills as “the leading cause of personal bankruptcy” in the United States. She bases that opinion in part on her own research, in which she and her collaborators surveyed people who had experienced personal bankruptcy, asked them whether they’d experienced health-related financial distress, and concluded that 60% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. result…
Look at this trend in life expectancy, U.S. vs other developed countries, as a function of healthcare spending: Keep in mind, I DO NOT think life expectancy is a good way to judge the quality of healthcare or the efficiency of healthcare spending. But the graph should make us think about what we need to…