DENVER — Seven years ago, Erica Green learned through a Facebook post that her brother had been shot. She rushed to check on him at a hospital run by Denver Health, the city’s safety-net system, but she was unable to get information from emergency room workers, who complained that she was creating a disturbance. “I…
By KIM BELLARD I know: you’re pretty proud for being into “wearables” to help monitor your health and other functions. You’ve got some apps on your smartphone. You use a smartwatch. Maybe you’ve tried one of the many iterations of smart glasses, like Google Glass or Meta’s Ray Bans. You were disappointed when Humane’s AI…
The Incidental Economist website has a helpful explainer video. The truth is that higher cost is due to both higher prices and more utilization of healthcare goods and services. It is not caused by any one stakeholder within the healthcare ecosystem. Reducing health care costs would require significant–and often painful–tradeoffs.
After a patch of ice sent Marc Durocher hurtling to the ground, and doctors at UMass Memorial Medical Center repaired the broken hip that resulted, the 75-year-old electrician found himself at a crossroads. He didn’t need to be in the hospital any longer. But he was still in pain, unsteady on his feet, unready for…
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken major steps to help people with medical debt in its nearly 14-year history. It issued rules barring medical debt from Americans’ credit reports and went after debt collectors who pressured customers to pay bills they didn’t owe. But in early February, the Trump administration moved to effectively…
Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco medical school, has spent well over a decade researching the disquieting risk that one of modern medicine’s most valuable tools, computerized tomography scans, can sometimes cause cancer. Smith-Bindman and like-minded colleagues have long pushed for federal policies aimed at improving safety for patients undergoing CT…
The decline in cognitive health, especially that leading to Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases, is one of the most feared conditions by patients and their families. It’s also one of the most expensive. But if we can predict it early there are things we can do to prevent or ameliorate it. The issue has been…
By KIM BELLARD A recent report from Moody’s Analytics, by chief economist Mark Zandi, had an eye-opening fact: the top 10% of earners in the U.S. – those who make $250,000 or more – now account for just shy (49.7%) of half of consumer spending. If that strikes you as unusual, you’re right. It is…
A year ago, a new head of Social Security set out to stop the agency from financially devastating many of the people it was meant to help. The agency had long made it a practice to reduce or halt benefit checks to recoup billions of dollars in payments it sent recipients but later said they…
When congressional Republicans in 2017 pushed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and slash Medicaid, dozens of physician groups, patient advocates, hospitals, and others rallied to defend the law and the safety-net program. Eight years later, two industry groups have been notably restrained as GOP lawmakers consider sweeping new Medicaid cuts: the American Medical Association…