Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
I scared some people awhile back when I pointed to addiction’s prevalence among physicians as example of how there is no contradiction between being professionally successful and having a substance use disorder. I suspect this recent study showing extensive drinking problems among surgeons generated similar anxiety. The study is not without flaws (particularly a low [...]
Archive for the ‘Health Care’ Category
May 2nd, 2012
AARP estimates that around 25 Million persons are providing unpaid caregiving to a loved one with a disability, and that those who do so while juggling market work lose around $325,000 in lifetime income after accounting for foregone wages, income from Social Security, and private pensions. The worst part of the demise of the CLASS [...]
April 30th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Health Care
Life is tough when you are a fast growing-cancer, because your host has difficulty meeting your increasing needs for oxygen. You can cope by stimulating your host to grow more blood vessels to carry oxygen to you or by metastitising your cells to oxygen sources elsewhere in the body. But some hypoxic cancers have an [...]
April 23rd, 2012
Category: Health Care
(cross posted at freeforall) The 2012 Medicare Trustees report is out (h/t @sarahkliff), and one graph jumped out at me: the historical and projected financing components of Medicare (payroll taxes, income taxes, premiums, and the much smaller items of taxes on benefits for higher income persons and state contributions for Part D). Historically, payroll taxes [...]
April 17th, 2012
(cross posted at freeforall) Jonathan Bernstein with a post decrying the poor job the WaPo Ombudsman did in describing the controversy around the piece put out last week by Charles Blahous that said the ACA will increase the deficit (contro to CBO’s longstanding estimates). I was with my family in a car heading South on [...]
April 15th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Health Care
One lesson is already resoundingly clear: the growth of health care spending threatens the sustainability of every other public service, from education, to public health, to infrastructure, to defense. That’s Zirui Song and Bruce Landon, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine about health care costs in Massachusetts, which has near-universal health insurance coverage. [...]