Pain Doesn’t Belong on a Scale of Zero to 10
A popular scale for measuring pain doesn’t work, but medicine still has no better alternative.
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A popular scale for measuring pain doesn’t work, but medicine still has no better alternative.
One of the most unfair aspects of medical insurance is this: Patients can change insurance only during end-of-year enrollment periods or at the time of “qualifying life events.” But insurers’ contracts with doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies can change abruptly at any time.
Resorting to crowdfunding to pay medical bills has become so routine, in some cases health professionals recommend it.
It’s a big job clearing out so-called “patent thickets” drugmakers create to keep their products’ prices high. But the Federal Trade Commission is giving it a shot.
The designers of the Affordable Care Act might have assumed that they spelled out with sufficient clarity that millions of Americans would no longer have to pay for certain types of preventive care. But they didn’t reckon with America’s ever-creative medical billing juggernaut.
At $1,000 a night for a private room, medical centers are offering fancy food and casting health care as a “journey.” Instead of creature comforts, how about helping us feel better?
The CDC’s RSV vaccination recommendations beg the question: How much should an immunization that will possibly be given to millions of Americans cost to be truly valuable?
The declining share of U.S. doctors in adult primary care is about 25% — a point beyond which many Americans won’t be able to find a family doctor at all.
Brand-name drug prices in the U.S. — more than three times the price in other developed countries — are related neither to the amount of research and development required to bring them to market nor their therapeutic value, recent research shows. Have drugmakers overplayed their hand?
After decades of unchecked mergers, health care is the land of giants, with huge medical systems monopolizing care in many cities, states, and even whole regions of the country. This decreases patient choice, impedes innovation, erodes quality of care, and raises prices. And federal regulators have been slow to act.
The Department of Health and Human Services is tasked with monitoring denials both by Obamacare health plans and those offered through employers and insurers. As insurers’ denials become more common, they sometimes defy not just medical standards of care but sheer logic. Why hasn’t the agency fulfilled its assignment?
Given a dire shortage of human behavioral health providers in the U.S., it may prove tempting for insurers to offer up apps and chatbots to meet the federal mental health parity requirement. But artificial intelligence, by definition fake, can’t master the empathic flow between patient and doctor that’s central to therapy.
Today’s public service announcements on gun safety feel somewhat sanitized. It’s time to act with the same kind of visceral public campaign that helped de-glorify smoking. Would filmmakers commit to making action movies without guns, just as filmmakers stopped making smoking glamorous in films?
With fears of a winter surge looming, government agencies have authorized and encouraged vaccination with a newly formulated booster. But the science to support that decision remains inconclusive.
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