Blog Posts (109)
May 22, 2013
Healthcare systems are big and complex beasts, that are very hard to transform overnight. In the United States, for example, we have long had a system of care dominated by fee-for-service payment. In this kind of system, the more tests and procedures a...
May 21, 2013
In high school, I was taught not to repeat words too often in the same paragraph, or even within a relatively short essay. I know I am not alone in having been taught that way, because many of the people I’ve mentored over the years present me drafts...
May 20, 2013
I’m currently in the middle of reading Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. I’ll be blogging intermittently about this wonderful book over the next few weeks. Expect a few of those posts to be focused...
May 20, 2013
If you have been paying attention to US healthcare policy debates lately, you know that hospitals have a price problem. Walk across the street from one hospital to a competitor hospital, and you could easily find yourself facing a $30,000 increase in ...
May 17, 2013
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...
May 16, 2013
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, ...
May 15, 2013
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 ...
May 14, 2013
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...
May 13, 2013
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...
May 13, 2013
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...
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