Category: Public Health & Policy

Is health care just legal human trafficking?

The standard business model around which our world revolves has no place in the “business” of human life, which is what the commercialized industry of health care has become. To be the most successful, businesses work to optimize profits by minimizing …

The hidden benefits of your health insurance plan can save your life

At kitchen tables everywhere, ordinary Americans have been grappling with the arcane language of deductibles and co-pays as they’ve struggled to select a health insurance plan during open enrollment season. Unfortunately, critical information that coul…

What is the Trump health plan for 2020?

The Republicans don’t yet have a health care plan less than a year before the 2020 elections. But based upon their 2017 Obamacare repeal and replace efforts, as well as a major document recently issued by the House Republican Study Committee, wha…

How special interests won big and consumers lost big

As the year winds down and must-pass year-end spending bills are completed — and with that, any chance of attaching and approving health care legislation — the special interests have won big, and consumers have lost big. Employers, unions, …

Our optimal future U.S. health care system

Next in a series. The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care syste…

5 improvements needed to modernize the American hospital landscape

Over the past 40 years, the number of U.S. hospitals declined by 12 percent, from more than 7,100 in 1975 to 6,200 in 2017, according to the latest American Hospital Association survey. And, yet, despite shuttering nearly 1,000 facilities, hospitals re…

Medicare for all is dead because Democratic voters aren’t buying it

Fixing Obamacare and adding a public option is the health care policy territory first staked out by Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Writing about Biden’s plan recently on my blog, I said: If the Democrats capture the White House, kee…

We need physicians who advocate for patients’ best interests

As presidential hopefuls debate health care reform, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish statements rooted in fact from fiction. According to PolitiFact, only 27% of politicians’ media statements regarding health care — whether from Dem…

The burden of prior authorizations and denials in health care

Prior authorization — a utilization management (UM) process used by health insurance companies to determine coverage for a prescribed procedure, service, or medication — is now becoming a mandatory requirement by the vast majority of large insurance co…

The burden of prior authorizations and denials in health care

Prior authorization — a utilization management (UM) process used by health insurance companies to determine coverage for a prescribed procedure, service, or medication — is now becoming a mandatory requirement by the vast majority of large insurance co…