Evidence demonstrates that just providing prices to employees via an online tool is frequently not helpful. A study of two large employers providing a price transparency tool found no change in healthcare spending and employee uptake…
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
Who Enrolls in Medicare Advantage Plans?
The demographics of the Medicare Advantage (MA) program are very different from Fee For Service (FFS) Medicare, with greater enrollment of retired working class and middle class beneficiaries and greater Hispanic and African-American beneficiaries. With a holistic health benefits package constructed from FFS Medicare costing the beneficiary twice as much as Medicare Advantage, it is no surprise that the population enrolled in FFS Medicare who has purchased a separate Medigap plan are far wealthier and more likely to be Caucasian. Of the estimated 29.7 million enrolled in FFS Medicare in CY2022, 12.5 million purchased a Medigap plan with 91% being Caucasian.
Some Medical Schools Shorten Medical Degrees to Three Years
It is not easy to train new physicians. Medical school takes four years and requires another three to seven years of residency before a physician can begin to practice medicine. There is also a shortage of graduate medical training slots (i.e. residencies), creating a bottleneck that further limits the number of doctors trained.
A relatively recent trend is to shorten medical school to three years rather than four for students who want to practice general medicine.
Do We Need a New Definition of Death?
In medicine there are only two reasons a person can be declared dead: Either the heart has stopped [circulatory death] or the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart is still beating….
Source: New York Times