Define Emergency! Skin in the Game Causes Poor People to Avoid Necessary Care
Most new insurance plans sold on Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges will have deductibles greater than $1000. That’s the kind of number that’s going to make people think twice about going to the...
View ArticleIs the American Healthcare System Addicted to Expensive Drugs?
To almost every claim that the American healthcare system is overpriced, defenders of the United States can point to the comparison problem—it is not fair to compare American surgeons, or hospitals, to...
View ArticleFull Disclosure: Out-of-Pocket Costs As Treatment Side Effects
Here is a link to an article I co-authored in the New England Journal this week, with Yousuf Zafar and Amy Abernethy. In the article, we urge physicians to talk about out-of-pocket costs with...
View ArticleDoctors Urged to Talk About Costs of Treatment
Physicians need to broach discussions about out-of-pocket costs with patients the same way they discuss a treatment’s side effects, public policy professors wrote. “Admittedly, out-of-pocket costs are...
View ArticleDo Malpractice Fears Cause Physicians to Order Unnecessary Tests?
Ask physicians if our messed up malpractice system causes them to practice “defensive medicine,” and most will probably say yes – hard not to be paranoid with so many lawsuits affecting so many...
View ArticleToxic Side Effect: High Out-of-Pocket Health Care Costs
When is the treatment worse than the disease? When the high costs associated with care become a financial burden for patients and in many cases prevent them from protecting their health, contends Peter...
View ArticleMaking Hospital Prices Matter
I recently learned about a company called OpsCost, which has a very user-friendly website designed to help people figure out how much different hospitals charge for a wide range of treatments and...
View ArticleDoctor, First Tell Me What It Costs
If an antibiotic would cure your infection, your doctor would probably still warn you about the chance of sun sensitivity before prescribing the pill. But even when the costs of a medical intervention...
View ArticleNewsweek Tackles the Challenge of Money Talk
In response to the New England Journal article I published with Yousuf Zafar and Amy Abernethy, Newsweek chimed in this week with a report on the topic, including some thoughtful commentary from other...
View ArticleWhy Discussing the Cost of an MRI to Evaluate Knee Pain Can Be a Total Pain
I want to share a wonderful blog post with you, written by one of “my” students, Laura Mortimer – a student in the Masters in Public Policy program at the Sanford School at Duke, who also happens to be...
View ArticleThe US is Number One: in Out-of-Pocket Costs!
I have been writing a fair amount lately about the out-of-pocket costs that many Americans face when they receive healthcare services. A new report by The Commonwealth Fund provides a picture of the...
View ArticleMore Discussion about Discussing Out-Of-Pocket Costs
In the wake of my recent New York Times op-ed, and other writing about patient out-of-pocket costs, I was interviewed by Tammy Worth, a writer at Renal and Urology News. She did a great job of...
View ArticleOutlier Nation: US Health Care Spending and Life Expectancy
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...
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