How our refusal to face up to the realities of aging and mortality causes needless suffering.
Health Care
After Obamacare
A frenzy of hospital mergers could leave the typical American family spending 50 percent of its income on health care within ten years—and blaming the Democrats. The solution requires banning price discrimination by monopolistic hospitals.
Special Deal
The shadowy cartel of doctors that controls Medicare.
A Day in the Life of a Primary Care Doctor
A harried pediatrician tells her story.
The Doctor Cartel Will See You Now
Conservatives have long warned that government-mandated universal health care will lead to long wait times to see doctors, as in Canada and the United Kingdom. But the truth is that we already have long waits to see some kinds of doctors in the United States. It takes nearly a month (twenty-seven days) for the average… Read more »
First Teach No Harm
The U.S. spends $13 billion a year subsidizing graduate medical education. Yet almost all of this money winds up producing the wrong kinds of doctors in the wrong places, with America’s most elite teaching hospitals being the worst offenders.
Consequential Drift
The government program where party differences have widened the most, and matter the most, is Medicaid.
The Republican Case for Waste in Health Care
Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand.
Reality-Based Mental Health Reform
Preventing mass killings like the one in Newtown may be impossible. But there’s plenty we can do to reduce violence by the mentally ill in general. And the tools are right there in Obamacare.
Color-Blind Medicine?
In 2002, the Institute of Medicine published an oft-cited and controversial report entitled Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. The report concluded that members of minority groups, even when fully insured, tend to receive substandard care from their doctors. It cited disparities in how often whites and minorities received even routine… Read more »
