Big Pharma and Politics
At a rally in Kentucky, President Donald Trump said drug prices were “outrageous”. The next day, according to Kaiser Health News, the pharmaceutical industry donated more money to political campaigns than any other day this year. On March 21, eight pharma political action committees made 137 contributions to 77 politicians totaling nearly $280,000. Both Republicans and […]
The Real Problem With Healthcare
Paul Matadeen called me for an impromptu interview about the stall in the Senate healthcare legislation. Here is what I told him.
Healthcare Cost: High Spenders and Low Spenders Get Same Results
The Journal of the American Medical Association (Internal Medicine) published a new study on the cost of healthcare. Researchers analyzed 485,000 Medicare patient hospital visits between 2011 and 2014. The visits involved almost 22,000 hospitalists, medical specialists who work in the hospital. The number of tests and consultations prescribed for the patients varied widely, even within […]
Healthcare Common Sense: What Congress and the President Should Do
The good news is there is a lot of discussion in political circles about healthcare. The bad news is our political leaders, on both sides of the aisle, are not discussing the real problem. In Health Attitude: Unraveling and Solving the Complexities of Healthcare, I wrote about the many problems of the American healthcare system, but the […]
Healthcare Quality Varies Significantly by State
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) gathers data on more than 250 measures of healthcare quality and access to healthcare. After crunching a lot of data, the federal agency found a wide variance between states in the quality of the healthcare the states delivered. The top five states are Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire […]
