Skip to main content

Good news about health care costs!

Happy New Year! According to Health Affairs, a journal of health economics, the rise in health care spending in the US is flat, and spending on physician's services rose at an all time low number of 1.8%. The interpretation of this information is that health care, even though it is considered a necessity, has been impacted by the weak economy. That is certainly a factor, but it is interesting to see that health care spending can go down without the quality of care looking catastrophically worse In fact it looks like there are many areas of improved care in the last two years. My guess is that spending came down because there is enough fat (and there is still more fat) that can be cut just by physicians and consumers being aware of what is of value in medicine. We are probably also seeing effects of preparing for and responding to health care reform in a way that has reduced waste.

So happy New Year! We have started the year with health care costs that have risen only as fast as the GDP. We can do better, yes, but it is clear that better is the direction in which we are moving.

Comments

Medical Brokers said…
Because the American healthcare system is based on the needs of the CORPORATIONS, not the needs of the people.The intend is to maximize profits while denying care.Besides, the more you are stuck in debt, the better for them, they can keep on liking you for years. That is the reason why with a group of Swiss friends we founded a Company to allow patients seek affordable healthcare outside the united states:

www.medicalbrokers.net
March 5, 2012 at 6:48 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and environmentally friendly) **UPDATED--NEW RECIPE**

I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I could diagnose heart disease, kidney and gallbladder problems, various cancers as well as lung and intestinal diseases. Then I realized that I would have to take a whole bunch of ultrasound gel with me which would mean that I would have to check luggage, which is a real pain when traveling light to a place where luggage disappears. I heard that you can use water, or spit, in a pinch, or even lotion, though oil based coupling media apparently break down the surface of the transducer. Or, of course, you can just use ultrasound gel. Ultrasound requires an aqueous interface between the transducer and the skin or else all you see is black. Ultrasound gel is a clear goo, looks like hair gel or aloe vera, and is made by several companies out of various combinations of propylene glycol, glyce...
40 comments
Read more

Actinic Keratoses and Carac (fluorouracil) cream: why is this so expensive?

First, a disclaimer: I don't know why Carac (0.5% flourouracil cream) is so expensive. I will speculate, though, at the very end of this blog. Sun and the skin: what happens If a person reaches a certain age, has very little pigment in her skin, and has spent lots of time in the sun, bad stuff happens. The ultraviolet radiation of the sun does all kinds of great things: it makes us happy, causes us to synthesize vitamin D which strengthens our bones and it gives us this healthy glow until we get old and wrinkled and leathery. And even that can be charming. The skin cells put up with this remarkably well for a long time, partly aided by melanin pigment which absorbs the radiation, which is why we tan and freckle, if we are fair skinned. Eventually, though, we absorb enough radiation that it injures the skin and produces cells which multiply oddly. It also damages the skin's elasticity which creates wrinkles. The cells which reproduce in odd ways peel, creating dry skin or...
26 comments
Read more

Covid 19--How the novel coronavirus will change everything

Not yet facing the emotionally draining horror of working to take care of people in a system that is overwhelmed, I am full of ideas. I am fascinated with the way the response to this global pandemic has transformed pretty much everything. People are willing to do very difficult things and large, slow systems are speeding up their processes to try to mitigate this disease's bad effects. Could have been faster, but that's in the category of regrets for which we have no time. The first cases of acute respiratory distress syndrome from a novel coronavirus were in Wuhan, China in December 2019. At first they were thought to be SARS (another coronavirus with a different scary history ). By the beginning of January the virus was characterized and found to be a different respiratory virus. It was called SARS-CoV-2 (I think that is an acronym for "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2"--sort of like Terminator-2. Except that there were nearly 18 years between ...
9 comments
Read more