WhyTheHeck

This posting is from someone whom we shall call “Alice” for the simple reason that “Alice” is indeed her name.   It came in via email and Iam not sure whe wants her last name used.
Alice suggests changing the rule where a hospital resuscitates a dying patient who “codes” unless the patient has signed an advance [...]

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Member acquisitions costs can approach 10% of fees in Medicare Advantage HMOs. By making Medicare Fee For Service an “opt out” rather than

One way to significantly impact overall costs is to insist on ‘broker’ fee transparency. The brokers fees can be as high as 15% (they are often less) of the fees paid to the insurance company and are often not identified to the buying employer. Brokers have on occasion caused the buying employer to spend more [...]

The author is my sister-in-law (I am widowed; she is talking about her late sister, my wife). She proposes that the Yankees sell Lou Gehrig’s #4 jerseys with proceeds going to ALS. When I saw that idea, I thought, the team must already be doing that, but no. They sell those jerseys the same way they sell their others. I recommend reading this posting to learn much more than you knew about Gehrig and his ALS, and then bombarding the Yankees with requests that they do exactly that. I can’t imagine they’ve made a conscious decision not to do this. I just think no one has suggested it to them.

Pharmaceutical costs in the United States has been rising significantly in recent years (other than 2008) at a rate higher than inflation. A portion of these costs are due to price increases, but a significant portion is due to the ability of the pharmaceutical companies to increase market [...]

A restaurant which insisted on giving us more food than we wanted, and wouldn’t let us leave until we ate it all, and sent the other diners the check for our extra portions, would go out of business within hours.
Yet, that is exactly what happens when it is time to die. In [...]

Be careful before assuming that prevention is the key to lower healthcare costs. Like with most things in life (1) you need to look at the data and (2) as HL Mencken said, “For every problem, no matter how complex, there is a simple and easily understood solution, and it’s almost always wrong.”

From time to time I have had the urge to try figure out which between the two different models of health systems in the developed world, namely the USA health system in one side or the UK, Canadian, Australian, New Zealandian, Danish etc. in the other, is better or worse than the other.
It is [...]

Medical costs are not just driven by disease and ill health, but by care seeking propensity.
Ask the question in any commercial health plan population (diseased or not) and you will find similar trends. People with a lower trigger point of when to seek care generate about double the claims compared to those who only seek [...]