A new study suggests that teaching hospitals -- our centers of academic medical excellence -- are no more expensive to patients than your local community hospital. While we may quibble about the numbers, one thing is clear: the cost of hospitalization is only a little more transparent than the cost of medications. Do we see a pattern?
healthcare costs
Fuzzy math rears its head in a new report on smoking and healthcare costs. Smoking is a big health risk, and we don't need fuzzy math to see that greatly reducing this health hazard will reduce tobacco-related costs.
Insurance providers use big sticks. They call them co-payments and high deductibles, used to try and lower their costs. Yet, when they try the carrot of rewards -- using actual dollars -- we have little interest.
When we talk about cost and price transparency, medical devices are rarely mentioned. It represents about 5% of our healthcare spending, or roughly $120 billion in 2017. That's less than the $500 billion we spend on pharmaceuticals. But then as the old saying goes, "a billion here, a billion there, after a while you are talking about real money."
Hospitals continue to be penalized for readmissions. But should we look at the size of the penalty, or the rate of improvement? More importantly, do readmission penalties improve care? Let's find out.
Several years after Obamacare was approved, healthcare costs continue to rise in America. The question of why – and, perhaps more importantly, how much of these costs should be covered by the government – continue to spark intense political debate. New research may shed some light on this issue.
With rising costs, an inundated healthcare system, and limited resources, physicians have been known to ration medical services. According to a recent study, over half of the physicians surveyed reported withholding beneficial clinical services to patients over the past six months, with prescription drugs and MRIs at the top of the restricted list.
A new report by IMS Health, a consulting company that provides information and analyses of multiple facets of healthcare economic, scientific, others concluded that prescription drug costs jumped by more than 13 percent last year the biggest increase since 2001.
There are now multiple ongoing discussions about Sovaldi, Gilead s revolutionary drug for treating hepatitis C. The arguments are more or less
When a drug or medical device becomes available in the marketplace, few if any experts (including doctors) or individual patients question its price. In her article in the NYTimes,