Followers of this blog, and I mean both of you, know by now that I am a fan of getting the word out about good writing. Here’s a nice example from the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It is from the cover article, titled “We Will Never Run Out Of…
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Author Archive: Peter Ubel
05/16/2013
What Does It Mean to Be an Organism?
In a tremendous article in The Smithsonian Magazine, Richard Conniff writes about the largely unexplored oodles of microorganisms that make us what we are. The article overflows with wonderful facts: for instance, that there are 150 microbial species, …
05/15/2013
What Countries Are Successfully Controlling Healthcare Costs, and How Are They Doing That?
In the April issue of Health Affairs, a group of authors explored the cost-containment strategies and four “high income countries“, and try to see what they were doing that we are currently not doing in the United States. The first picture …
05/14/2013
Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy
I am not a fan of judging the quality of a nation’s healthcare system by examining life expectancy. Many, many factors influence life expectancy that have nothing to do with healthcare. When examining life expectancy in developed countries, for examp…
David Brooks is a pretty solidly moderate conservative, and one who is a big fan of behavioral science. But that doesn’t mean he can see beyond his own biases, especially when describing the differences between conservatives and liberals. He was part…
05/13/2013
Great Picture on Drug Development Targets
Matthew Herper and Erin Carlyle at Forbes magazine recently put together a wonderful picture, showing what kinds of diseases pharmaceutical companies are targeting now in developing new drugs. The bigger the bubble, the larger the number of drugs under…
05/10/2013
Hospital Pricing Insanity
Once again, lots of reports in the news about crazy variation in hospital prices in the United States, with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars difference in the price of services from one hospital to its neighbor across the street. Marketplace d…
There is one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle agree upon: the biggest threat to the future fiscal solvency of the United States is Medicare, the program that pays medical expenses for elderly and disabled Americans. For many years now,…
On April 14, The United States Preventive Services Taskforce concluded that women with an elevated risk of breast cancer – who have never been diagnosed with breast cancer but whose family history and other medical factors increase their odds of deve…
It’s comforting to think that most healthcare problems in the U.S. could be solved by letting the power of an unregulated free market do its work.
It’s also wishful thinking and overly simplistic, according to Peter Ubel, MD, a general internist, b…