Tag Archives: Healthcare

run75441: I have been fortunate to run across incredibly intelligent people here and other places who continue to impress me with their command on particular topics. Esmensetoo has an excellent knowledge of healthcare and healthcare insurance and how it has evolved. I was not expecting quite this much. It does cover all of the bases and there is still more to be had. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. In the 1980s when managed care was just...

I had thought these types of treatment had gone by the wayside in treatment during the last year of life. According to an Medscape article they have not. “‘Physicians should carefully consider whether the prescribed drugs are likely to achieve their benefit within the patient’s remaining lifetime,’ the authors concluded. The study included 151,201 patients ages 65 years and older who died in Sweden at a mean age of 81.3 years from 2007 to 2013. ‘The use...

Spoiler: It isn’t working. Charles Gaba at ACA Signups had this up. In an excellent scoop by Dan Diamond and Adam Cancryn this morning, Politico reports that CMS Administrator Seema Verma, the woman in charge of Medicare and Medicaid who takes great joy in trashing Medicare and Medicaid has spent millions of dollars on partisan consulting firms to boost her own image. The Trump appointee who oversees Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare quietly directed...

Brad DeLong got a huge amount of attention by saying it was time for neoliberals such as Brad DeLong to pass the baton to those to their left. Alarmingly, he seems to have written this first on twitter. Zach Beuchamp rescued it from tawdry twitter to now very respectable blogosphere with an interview. One interesting aspect is that Brad has very little criticism of 90s era Brad’s policy proposals. Basically, the argument is that Democrats must stick...

In parts of Livingston and Oakland counties, the people have been warned not to eat the fish from the Huron River and Kent, Strawberry, Zukey, Gallagher, Loon, Whitewood, Base Line and Portage lakes as well as Hubbell Pond due to the fish being contaminated with PFAS and similar chemicals coming from industries. In 2016, Michigan started to tell people about the impact of PFAS and how dangerous the PFAS and PFOAs are. PFAS/PFOA are part of a class of...

“The Pentagon is planning to tap $1 billion in leftover funds from military pay and pension accounts to help President Donald Trump pay for his long-sought border wall, a top Senate Democrat said Thursday. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL ‘It’s coming out of military pay and pensions. $1 billion. That’s the plan. The funds are available because Army recruitment is down and a voluntary early military retirement program is being underutilized.’ The development comes...

This should come as no surprise as I have written on the topic of Healthcare Costs and Its Drivers before. In particular, the overriding statistic from an earlier post was 50% of the increase in healthcare costs was due solely to price increases between 1996 and 2013 (JAMA, Factors Associated With . . . . Adjusting for inflation, “annual health care spending on inpatient, ambulatory, retail pharmaceutical, nursing facility, emergency department, and...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) The Ethics of Clinical Trials In a clinical trial the therapy is decided by a pseudo random number generator. How can this be ethical ? People are treated differently for no reason related to different interests different values and priorities or even different merit (assuming merit can differ).There is a utilitarian rational for clinical trials. Through such trials doctors learn, and that knowledge is...

Massachusetts ACA Enrollment Exceeds Last Year, Charles Gaba, ACA Signups Blog Massachusetts: (January 14, 2018) saw an increased 285,000 signups for healthcare for 2019 which is up 6.6% YOY and with 9 days left until the ACA signup deadline. This comes even though Republicans and Trump have been sabotaging the ACA. Even more impressive, 97.2% (90% National Average) of enrollees have paid their 1st month fees. Republicans and Trump Implement the CSR...

In a clinical trial the therapy is decided by a pseudo random number generator. How can this be ethical ? People are treated differently for no reason related to different interests different values and priorities or even different merit (assuming merit can differ). There is a utilitarian rational for clinical trials. Through such trials doctors learn, and that knowledge is useful to future patients. But this rationale is utterly rejected as ethically...