Out of Control Health Costs or a Broken Society
Flawed Accounting for the US Health Spending Problem
By Jeff Goldsmith
Source: OECD, Our World in Data
Late last year, I saw this chart which made my heart sink. It compared US life expectancy to its health spending since 1970 vs. other countries. As you can see, the US began peeling off from the rest of the civilized world in the mid-1980’s. Then US life expectancy began falling around 2015, even as health spending continued to rise. We lost two more full years of life expectancy to COVID. By the end of 2022, the US had given up 26 years-worth of progress in life expecta...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 9, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy COVID Drug Overdoses gun violence Hospitals Jeff Goldsmith Maternal mortality Mental Health Obesity Poverty Regional Economy Society Source Type: blogs
How to pick the right mutual funds to reduce your taxes
Tax-efficient investing is about preserving your capital by optimizing investment decisions to minimize the tax consequences. This strategy becomes especially crucial when you’re investing for the long term. With their professional management and diversification, mutual funds offer several avenues for tax-efficient investing. 1. Capital gains efficiency. When you buy and sell individual stocks, you’re responsible for
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How to pick the right mutual funds to reduce your taxes originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - October 4, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Amarish Dave, DO Tags: Finance Practice Management Source Type: blogs
A season of emotions: spring, trauma, and healing
Spring is an interesting time of the year for me. April 15 may actually be my favorite day, but certainly not because income taxes are due. My dad was born on April 15, but that’s not the reason either. Let me set the scene. I lived in a beautiful home in a wooded area outside Philadelphia
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A season of emotions: spring, trauma, and healing originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - September 9, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA Tags: Physician Psychiatry Source Type: blogs
Year-end tax strategies: How to lower your tax bill
I can’t believe it is the last quarter of 2023 already. As the end of the year approaches, many doctors are busy with patients trying to get in for procedures as deductibles get met. It’s also a crucial time to consider what’s going to happen when you file your taxes in 2024. Making strategic investments
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Year-end tax strategies: How to lower your tax bill originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - September 6, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Amarish Dave, DO Tags: Finance Practice Management Source Type: blogs
The Bumper Sticker Problem
I haven ' t posted the past couple of days because my mother died on Wednesday. Not a tragedy really, it was overdue, but I had to deal with various issues. Next item: Parents determine the education of their children.The bullet list I ' m working through can be thought of as bumper sticker slogans. Yes, they ' re short and simple but that doesn ' t mean anybody can understand them. On the contrary, they may seem superficially plausible or even convincing, but it turns out that they evade the facts, or complexity of a problem. They may contain an unstated assumption that turns out to be false, or make sense only in an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 2, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The One Question FOX News Moderators Should Ask Tonight
This article was published a week after the Republican Party Primary debate
BY MIKE MAGEE
This evening, the Republican Party will sponsor their first Primary Debate. It will be historic in featuring the absence of their lead contender for the 2024 Presidential campaign, a candidate who appears committed to the destruction of their own political party
Events over the past year clearly have confirmed that we are a “work in progress” even as we stubbornly affirm our good intentions to create a society committed to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
With the Dobbs’ decision, our Supreme C...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 30, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Non-Health Dobbs Mike Magee Republican Primary Source Type: blogs
Let ’ s Start Over
BY KIM BELLARD
When I first read the reports about some Silicon Valley billionaires wanting to start a new city, I figured, oh, it’s just a bunch of rich white guys wanting to take their toys and go to a new, better home. After all, they’ve seen what’s been happening to downtown San Francisco (or Portland, or Chicago – pick your preferred city).
Cities these days may be an what one expert calls an “urban doom loop” – struggling to recover after having been hollowed out by the pandemic. These so-called elites probably figured it’s easier to build something new rather than to try to fix what already ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 29, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: The Business of Health Care Flanner Associates Kim Bellard Silicon Valley Urban Doom Loop Zoning Source Type: blogs
A promise I won't make
Running for First Selectman makes me think about some issues a bit differently. Our town has fiscal problems, because we have a very small commercial tax base, and few kids in school which means our per pupil cost is high. (We still need a principal and a custodian and a building, and class sizes are small.) I might be able to do something about that. At least I have ideas and I ' ll campaign on them.But one of the biggest complaints people have is that the power goes out very frequently, and it usually takes a long time to get it restored. I finally broke down and got a standby generator, but they ' re expensive and this ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 22, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Five alarms
The U.S. corporate media have extensively covered the Maui wildfire, they have mentioned the fires in the Northwest Territories and particularly Yellowknife, but there are immense fires burning all around the northern hemisphere that they barely mention. That they areignoring the fires in British Columbia seems particularly strange, since the province borders the U.S. and areas of large population are threatened. There is also amassive fire on Tenerife, andfires on the Spanish mainland.The earth has changed, and the change is building on itself and accelerating. We can ' t stop it but we absolutely must slow it down,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
THCB 20th Birthday classics: A Brief History of Price Controls by Annoyed Republican Administrations
By UWE REINHARDT
One of the greatest pleasures of running THCB has been to get to know and host the writings of some of my health policy heroes. This week I have already published work from Jeff Goldsmith, and Ian Morrison & Michael Millenson among others will be featured next week (as the party won’t quite stop). Perhaps one of the most amazing things was that the doyen of health economists, Uwe Reinhardt, offered to write some original pieces for THCB…prodded by former editor John Irvine. This is one of my favorites, riffing on a talk I heard him give in (I think) 1993 about how HCFA was like the Kreml...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 18, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Price controls Uwe Reinhardt Source Type: blogs
THCB 20th Birthday Classic: McKinsey wants to inspire lots of change; caveat emptor
by MATTHEW HOLT
So to celebrate 20 years, we’ll be publishing a few classics for the next week or so. This is one of my faves from the early days of THCB, back in 2006. It’s interesting to compare it with Jeff Goldsmith’s NEW piece from yesterday on vertical integration because at the time a pair of Harvard professors, Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg were telling hospitals to change their operations in a way that seemed to me were going to destroy their business–cut down to one or two service lines they were best at and stop with the rest. McKinsey picked up on this and I went to town on wh...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 14, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: The Business of Health Care Elizabeth Teisberg Hospitals Matthew Holt Mckinsey Michael Porter Source Type: blogs
A whole new perspective
Through a chain of events that I won ' t bore you by reciting, I find myself the Democratic candidate for First Selectman of the very small town I live in. (I expect that ' s surprising. It is to me.) This suddenly makes me think about problems I really hadn ' t considered much before.Our town ' s main industry is agriculture. We don ' t really have a main street. There ' s a liquor store, an auto repair business, an acupuncturist, a seamstress (really) and a chain saw shop. We have a sawmill and a campground. That ' s about it. Our problem is that agricultural land pays very little in real estate taxes, which means that a...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 12, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Price tag for a questionable Alzheimer ’s treatment: $109,000 per patient, per year. Unclear yet: For how many years?
The real costs of the new Alzheimer’s drug, Leqembi — and why taxpayers will foot much of the bill (CBS News):
The first drug purporting to slow the advance of Alzheimer’s disease is likely to cost the U.S. health care system billions annually even as it remains out of reach for many of the lower-income seniors most likely to suffer from dementia.
Medicare and Medicaid patients will make up 92% of the market for lecanemab, according to Eisai Co., which sells the drug under the brand name Leqembi. In addition to the company’s $26,500 annual price tag for the drug, treatment could cost U.S. taxpayers $82,500 per pati...
Source: SharpBrains - August 2, 2023 Category: Neuroscience Authors: SharpBrains Tags: Brain/ Mental Health Alzheimers-disease amyloid plaques brain hemorrhaging brain scans brain swelling dementia lecanemab Leqembi Medicaid Medicare PET-scan taxpayers Source Type: blogs
The view from nowhere
I commend to your attentionthis essay from Dan Froomkin on the willful blindness of the corporate media to the reality of right wing politics in the U.S. today. (Even Froomkin doesn ' t seem to notice that the Republican party generallyis driven by dispensationalism, that most of their voters really do believe in Biblical inerrancy and literalism, and the imminent apocalypse. But that ' s for another day.)I was particularly interested in Froomkin ' s example of opposition to solar farms in rural Ohio. Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein really stepped in it with his remarkably na ïve article headlined “Small-...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 29, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
