The Obama administration continues its weary slog toward the goal of selling millions of Americans a defective financial product, because markets.
Read more...MDs think about you the patient as unique in your need for health care. MBAs think about you the widget as a source of profit and institutional power.
Read more...We’ve been slowly working toward a theory of crapification and if we manage to sort it out, we might even develop a school of craopnomics. But in reality, Corporate America presumably already has that well codified but has yet to release the playbook to the great unwashed masses.
As much as I am of two minds about sharing personal anecdotes with readers, my recent experiences with the health insurer Cigna amount to several case studies in crapification in one nasty package. Moreover, since the American health care policy is to force even more Americans into the health insurance regime and call it “health care,” I thought my tale might elicit similar accounts from readers, as well as input from people who’ve worked in the insurance industry as to how much of what I am experiencing is incompetence versus design.
Read more...Artificial trans fat is omnipresent in the global food chain, but the medical consensus is that it increases the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke. Between 2007 and 2011, New York City and six other county health departments implemented bans on trans fat in restaurants. This column presents the first evaluation of the effect of these bans on cardiovascular disease mortality rates.
Read more...Sending veterans to private healthcare after breaking up the VA is what CNN, the media, and the politician’s call a “benefit” bestowed upon Veterans. It is not a benefit and will only make healthcare treatment worse for veterans.
Read more...Why, at least in the US, electronic health records are all about the looting and as a result, a danger to your health.
Read more...You’d never buy a house if you couldn’t look at the interior first, or if the price might double after you signed the contract. But health insurance….
Read more...ObamaCare should survive Constitutional challenge, is profitable for insurers, Medicaid enrollment is an administrative disaster,, and one woman’s opportunity costs show why ObamaCare polls badly.
Read more...Yves here. This post is an interesting “be careful what you wish for” warning as far as the legalization of marijuana is concerned.
Read more...Why health care will never work as a market good – there are extreme information asymmetries between the providers and the patients. That means, among other things, we need to recognize the inability of patients to know if they are getting good care or not (beyond a basic level of attentiveness) and the ease of getting them to believe that a lot of treatment, as in overtreatment, is tantamount to “good care”.
Read more...At one level, it’s vastly amusing to watch Big Pharma, through its powerful lobbying group PhRMA, complaining that its ox is being gored by insurers through how they’ve designed Obamacare plans. On another, though, the analysis prepared for PhRMA confirms what this site has long argued, that the Obamacare plans represent a deliberate effort to extract more rents from the public at large on behalf of the medical-industrial complex.
Read more...Eldercare is really the limit case of health care for profit. Stick a tube in the helpless body, extract rent. It’s brilliant in its simplicity!
Read more...1. How Many Lives Will ObamaCare Save?
2. What is the Actuarial Quality of the ObamaCare “Pool”?
3. Will People Be Satisfied with Their Plans Once They Use Them?
4. What Will Happpen to Employer-Based Insurance?
5. What About the Back End?
6. What About Single Payer?
1. How Many Lives Will ObamaCare Save?
2. What is the Actuarial Quality of the ObamaCare “Pool”?
3. Will People Be Satisfied with Their Plans Once They Use Them?
4. What Will Happpen to Employer-Based Insurance?
5. What About the Back End?
6. What About Single Payer?
Yves here. This post is important, not simply for chronicling health care corruption, but also in demonstrating how, just as in financial services, the individuals responsible are not targeted for fines or prosecution.
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