Health Care (page 6)

In the past, I have written about a healthcare payment model commonly referred to as “patient-centered” or “value-based” care (see here, here, and here). The idea behind patient-centered care is that the provider…

In a recent research brief, I argue that if our country is serious about bringing down the rising costs of health care, we need to get serious about making it work more like a true market. Consumers need to know prices and providers…

Primary care physicians have been on the decline in recent years and the projections for the future number of these type of doctors doesn’t look promising. As the number of baby boomers continue to age and live longer, the need for primary…

Recently, I’ve been going through the available research on Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws and their effects. CON laws are most often associated with attempting to restrict the supply of health care in order to control costs by reducing the amount of duplicate and unused services. In order to be…

John Cochrane, senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes in his blog, The Grumpy Economist, how government mandated cross-subsidization negatively impacts the costs of health care in the US: But lawmakers do…

From Sy Mukherjee at Fortune comes the tale of an interesting study and approach to reducing the prescribing of addictive opioids: write a letter. “A simple letter, supportive in tone, to inform clinicians of a scheduled drug harm to their patient resulted in fewer subsequent opioids dispensed by those…

I scratch my head when I hear pro big-government types express the view that more and more Americans are fat because we don’t have enough information about calories, sugar, etc. in the food we eat. Therefore, they tell us, the government should mandate that restaurants post all this information…

Let’s say you want your kid to have braces, but you’re struggling with the prospect of being charged $5,000 to $8,000 for the service, most of which you’re likely to pay out of pocket. Thanks to innovators, you don’t have to break the bank to have straight teeth. Alternatives to…