Health care sharing ministries have been around for years, and they fill a niche in a diverse insurance market shattered by Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has provisions that allow sharing ministries to coexist with Obamacare plans, which makes many consumers happy, but irritates some Obamacare advocates. It’s been a year since I last wrote…
Category: Direct Primary Care
Some Medicare Hospice Care Firms Are Better than Others
We have written about Medicare hospice care several times in the past. John Goodman wrote about a new Medicare pilot program where the same health plans that manage seniors’ medical care will also manage their hospice benefits near end-of-life. I wrote about how Medicare hospice care is growing by leaps and bounds, which is attracting scammers who enroll ineligible patients (not likely to die in six months) and gouge taxpayers for care that is inappropriate.
The New York Times published an article on the difference in hospice care provided by nonprofit versus for-profit organizations. Purportedly, nonprofit organizations are a better value.
Tuesday Links
- Can drinking water lower your stress level?
- 85% of patients say compassion is more important than price when choosing a doctor.
- 71% of patients say they have gone to doctors who were not compassionate.
- Chatbots are helping doctors find the words to break bad news or express concerns about a patient’s suffering. (NYT)
- Zuckerberg: Establishment asked to censor COVID-19 posts that ended up being true.
- Historians rate Woodrow Wilson as a near-great president and Warren Harding as among the worst. Graboyes: the reverse is true.
The Downside of Wildfires
Matt Yglesias writes:
There’s extensive evidence that the fine particulate matter that’s floating in the air on high pollution days impairs cognitive abilities. On high-pollution days, investors make worse trading decisions, baseball umpires blow more calls, chess players make more blunders, and British MPs speak at a lower grade level. This is also true of work that’s normally thought of as less-skilled — we see lower efficiency at pear-packing factories on high-pollution days. Prolonged exposure to pollution increases the risks of Alzheimer’s and dementia.