- Why do hospitalizations increase in the last quarter of the year?
- Scientists use AI to find an antibiotic for a multidrug-resistant bacteria.
- Scientists have managed to preserve rat kidneys for 100 days. Apparently, that’s good news for humans.
- For medical student education, is a virtual cadaver as good (or better) than a real one?
- Are crisis pregnancy centers deceiving pregnant mothers?
Category: News and Events
What Patients Want in a Physician
What do patients want in a physician and how do people select their doctors? These are questions that prompt different answers from different people. Answers likely vary depending on the type of health insurance those responding have. The following is from a Health Services Research study that is now 20 years old. It found that consumers were somewhat passive in their choice of physicians.
Monday Links
- AI is better than Dear Abby. HT: Tyler
- Commonwealth Fund: having insurance doesn’t mean health care is affordable. Missing: the observation that Obamacare has made the problem worse.
- The meaning of the Cigna settlement with the government: Medicare Advantage plans should be held accountable for submitting accurate risk adjustment data.
- Which is better: for-profit or nonprofit? All the evidence, much of which Effective Altruists helped to compile, shows that nonprofits are much more likely to be fraudulent, or to simply fail to achieve their goals.
- Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky makes two claims: one possibly true (there is no free will) and one very wrong (it is unfair to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior). The first claim is irrelevant because we experience the world as though we have free will, and we have no alternative to that. And, the reason to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior is the utilitarian desire to get more of the former and less of the latter.
- [This is also an example of the fallacy of the stolen concept. If you claim there is no good or bad behavior because there is no free will, you can’t turn around and use ethics to condemn the rewarding and the punishing.]
This Case Study Should be Required Reading in Every Health Econ Course
Man is diagnosed with throat cancer. Doctors at MD Anderson want to treat it with proton therapy at a cost of $96,862.95. The health insurer objects, saying that treatment should begin with less expensive radiation therapy. The doctors say that radiation therapy has a risk of damaging other organs.
In this case, the patient is a trial attorney with means. He pays the hospital for the proton therapy with his own funds and then sues the insurer.