As part of the Duke undergraduate course I teach on health care policy, I recently prepared a lecture on Bill Clinton’s ultimately futile efforts to reform the US health care system early in his first term of office, back in 1993. This preparation gave me an excuse to read Theda Skocpol’s wonderful book, Boomerang…(Read the rest and view comments at Scientocracy)
There is one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle agree upon: the biggest threat to the future fiscal solvency of the United States is Medicare, the program that pays medical expenses for elderly and disabled Americans. For many years now, the Medicare budget has been growing much faster than the economy as…
There are many reasons that life expectancy is not a good measure of a health care system. For starters, how long people live is often more a function of public health systems then of medical care systems, with clean water and low rates of infectious diseases having more impact on people’s life expectancy than their…
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…
If you have been paying attention to US healthcare policy debates lately, you know that hospitals have a price problem. Walk across the street from one hospital to a competitor hospital, and you could easily find yourself facing a $30,000 increase in your medical bills. At one extreme for instance recent information shows that replacing your hip…
Recently, Congressman Paul Ryan put together another budget balancing proposal. It has received a lot of attention in the news, even though it is as likely to be enacted as is the Senate Democrat alternative– in other words, it won’t be enacted. Nevertheless, for those of you interested in healthcare and healthcare policy, here’s a…
Joanne Reed’s breast cancer was discovered at an early stage, early enough that her doctors would be able to remove the tumor with surgery (either a mastectomy or a lumpectomy) and then, with a touch of chemo, she would face a decent chance of living out her life without a recurrence. But then Reed’s cancer…