The USA Is Number One… In Healthcare Prices!

The folks at Vox media put together a series of pictures, illustrating how much more expensive medical care is in United States compared to other developed countries. Today, and in the next few days, I’m going to circulate some of those pictures. Prepare yourself for horror! Take medications, for example. (Please!) Pills for rheumatoid arthritis…

Physician (and Pharma, and Insurance Executive) Pay: Doing Too Well by Doing Good

Shutterstock American physicians deserve to be paid well for their work. As a physician, myself, I know what it takes to become a doctor in the U.S. Four years of late nights in the college library in hopes of achieving a GPA commensurate with medical school admission; then four years of medical school, which makes…

Half of Healthcare Spending: For 1/20th of the People

It is not unfair that we spend more on medical care for some people than others. After all, some people are sicker than others. If there’s anything unfair, it’s probably the uneven distribution of illness and disability. That said, the disparity in healthcare spending across people is pretty staggering. As this picture shows, courtesy of…

If We Cut Surgical Pay, Will Surgeons Cut into More People?

Shutterstock Knee replacements are booming. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of knee replacement procedures in the U.S. doubled, to more than one million. Experts think the figure might rise 6-fold more in the next couple decades, because of our aging population. Since many people receiving knee replacements are elderly, Medicare picks up most of…

The Cost of New Cancer Drugs (In One Picture)

“Specialty drugs” – that’s what they’re called. Not the pills of old, these pharmaceuticals are often given intravenously or through injection. Often more biologic in their synthesis than chemical, they are expensive to produce and often target narrow disease processes, meaning the number of patients likely to benefit from them is much much smaller than,…