health-care costs
ddobbs | October 13, 2009
Mount Pisgah, diving into Lake Willoughby, way up noth
Vermont, my chosen and beloved place of residence, took the top spot last week in the Commonwealth's "State Scorecard" for healthcare, which ranks states based on access, quality, costs, and health outcomes.
For people who live elsewhere, this report adds one more thing to add to the list of Things That Make Vermont Cool. (This is a jump up from second place in the 2007 scorecard.) For people who live here, this report raises amazement -- and the feeling that it must be very bad indeed everywhere else.
Vermont's health system is a mess…
ddobbs | September 8, 2009
Matt Taibbi tells us what he really thinks.
Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world :
via Rolling Stone, and well worth a read.
ddobbs | July 8, 2009
Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations:
To ponder this question -- and to do investigative reporting -- I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Science -- the search…
ddobbs | June 23, 2009
I can't claim to be 'objective' or neutral on health-care reform -- but who can? Everybody needs health care, some more than others. I need it less than most, as my family and I are, knock on wood, generally blessed with good health. Even so, we laid out $18K last year for health care, still owe money -- and no one in the family ever entered an ER, got a scan, received a prescription costing more than $100, or got admitted to a hospital. And we're among the lucky ones who can (supposedly) afford insurance. (We pay $10K for a plan with a $5K deductible.) This is one of several reasons I'm…
ddobbs | June 18, 2009
A key component of health-care reform -- and saving our ass from going bankrupt and sick from spending too much on lousy treatments -- is establishing comparative effectiveness measures, otherwise known as "actually knowing WTF works and what doesn't."
This idea terrifies companies who don't want such objective measures. It also generates a lot of fear, partly via confusing or intentionally frightening arguments. Yet making sure we don't pay for stuff that doesn't work is key to reform -- a point made in this Times op-ed from libertarian economist Tyler Cohen, keeper of the blog Marginal…
ddobbs | May 18, 2009via Ezra Klein comes this bottom-line chart from the Center for Economic and Policy Research:
That orange line headed heaven-ward? That's our deficit. All those other lines dipping down? That's our deficit if we had the same health care spending per person as France, Germany, Canada, and the UK (all countries, incidentally, with higher life expectancies than our own). You might say, of course, that even radical reform would not bring us down to their health care spending. We could copy France's system wholesale and still pay more for care. You would be right. But such reforms would bring…