In my previous post I argued that the Affordable Care Act will make it harder for Medicaid enrollees to access care, largely due to an increase in the demand for medical services from the previously uninsured. In this post I review studies which suggest that there is a severe quality problem in Medicaid. (More...
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In 2014, the nation is expected to start insuring about 32 million uninsured people. About half will enroll in Medicaid directly; and if the Massachusetts precedent is followed, most of the remainder will be in heavily subsidized private plans that pay little more than Medicaid rates.[1] That raises an important question: How good is...
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As I explain in Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, there are many reasons why people disagree about healthcare policy. One obstacle to reaching an agreement is that many people don’t realize—or aren’t concerned—that they hold a double standard. If a private insurance company denies a breast cancer patient a bone marrow transplant, that’s considered...
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In 2011, 14.6% of households in the United States were below the poverty line, according to these statistics. That represents 16.8 million households. That same year, the federal government spent $746 billion on means-tested welfare programs, according to this report recently released by the Congressional Research Service. If that money were divided up and...
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Lack of quality competition is in part the result of certain characteristics of healthcare quality. What we call core quality is not a variable at all. As I discuss in my recent book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, it is the result of other decisions made by the providers. Since the vagaries of medical...
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Although we often associate the term entrepreneur with profit seeking, the healthcare field is teeming with innovators who are largely motivated by altruism. As I wrote in my new book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, take Dr. Jeffrey Brenner of Camden, New Jersey.* In any other field, Brenner would be a millionaire, but because...
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There is no topic in healthcare that is more misunderstood than what other countries are doing. At both ends of the political spectrum, the mistake is the same: the belief that other healthcare systems are radically different from our own. They aren’t. Take the United States and Canada. I would say that the healthcare...
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Do you care whether I have health insurance? If you do care, do you also care if I have other kinds of insurance? While you’re thinking about the initial question, here are a few follow-up questions: Do you care whether I have life insurance? What about disability insurance? Homeowner’s insurance? Auto casualty insurance? Auto...
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There have been a number of claims that lack of insurance is life threatening. The most recent and well known is an Institute of Medicine (IOM) study claiming that 18,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance.[1] Using a similar methodology, a study for the Physicians for a National Health...
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Ideal health insurance is often said to be health insurance with no deductible or co-payment, making medical care essentially free at the point of delivery. Yet, if patients have no out-of-pocket costs, their economic incentive will be to overuse the system, essentially consuming healthcare until the last amount obtained has a value that approaches...
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