_Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage increased to $15,073 this year, up 9 percent from last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust 2011 Employer Health Benefits Survey.  On average, workers pay $4,129 and employers pay $10,944 toward those annual premiums.   
Premiums increased significantly faster than workers’ wages (2.1 percent) and general inflation (3.2 percent).  Since 2001, family premiums have increased 113 percent, compared with 34 percent for workers’ wages and 27 percent for inflation.

The U.S. Census Bureau is now estimating that 50,000,000 Americans live in poverty.  The single biggest factor behind increased numbers is out-of-pocket health care costs.  Indeed, if the burden of health-care expenses were not taken into account, then 10 million fewer people would have been classified as poor, and one of the biggest jumps in poverty under the new method is among people with private health insurance.  Costs are rising so fast and employers are shifting more costs onto employees that many people with illness or accident simply can't keep up.
11/28/11
The United States Senate and the Justice Department are both reviewing Medtronic's synthetic bone graft, Infuse.  It is currently used in about half of the 80,000 anterior lumbar bone fusions performed each year in this country.  A report authored by Dr. Eugene Carragee in the Spine Journal (available by subscription)  confirmed that some of the 13 Medtronic-sponsored studies of Infuse had failed to properly disclose complications.
In an editorial accompanying the new study, Dr. James Kang of the University of Pittsburgh wrote that industry support was perhaps the best way to explain the different conclusions reached by Dr. Carragee and the Medtronic-sponsored researchers. “There does not seem to be any rational explanation for these observational differences,” Dr. Kang wrote.  Of note, the physicians who perform industry studies generally are paid millions of dollars in royalty or consulting fees.  One must wonder, what exactly are they paid to do?
6/22/11

Graphic illustration of the problems with America's healthcare system

Picture
Taken from UC Santa Cruz's Atlas of Inequality, the US ranks just ahead of Cuba in life expectancy while spending vastly more than any other country.  Only large-scale systemic reforms can improve this situation.
A new survey reveals that orthopedic surgery was the most lucrative specialty in American medicine last year.  The median income for orthopedists was $515,000.  Again, trailing far behind was family practice with a median income of $189,000.  Furthermore, orthopedic surgeons generally supplement their practice income with revenue derived from ownership positions in imaging centers, physical therapy, or surgery centers--an opportunity generally not available to primary care physicians.  Click here to view report and then open PDF.  Looking at these numbers, how can we not have an intractable problem steering new doctors into primary care fields?  How can specialists claim that they cannot afford to treat Medicare or Medicaid patients?
6/17/2011

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 21% of Americans support changing Medicare as a means of solving our nation's debt problems while only 30% of Americans back changes to Medicaid.  Furthermore, 65% of those polled believe that Medicare should remain a defined benefit program, as opposed to the vouched type program that the House of Representatives has just voted to endorse.
4/18/11

Physicians are among the biggest winners in President Obama's just released budget proposal for fiscal year 2012.  Despite cutting spending by the Department of Health and Human Spending for the first time in the 30 year life of the agency, he is proposing an additional $54 billion to protect physician fees from our current law's sustainable growth rate cuts for 2012 and 2013.  However, the budget proposal does nothing to address the long-term insolvency issues confronting both Medicare and Medicaid.  To read the budget proposal yourself, click on this link and scroll to page 83 to review the Health and Human Services budget.
2/15/11

The CDC has released its first report detailing racial and socioeconomic disparities in Americans' health.  Among other findings are these:
  • Babies born to black women are up to three times as likely to die in infancy as those born to women of other races.
  • Young American Indian adults have the highest suicide rate of any group by far.
  • The poor, the uninsured and the less educated tend to live shorter, sicker lives.
  • Rates of preventable hospitalizations increase as incomes decrease.
Read below for some of the reasons for these distressing statistics.  Read our Primary Care page for more. 
1/13/11

2009 was an exceptional year for medical economics.  The nation spent $2.5 trillion on health care or over $8,000 a person for the first time, and, while the rate of health care spending slowed to 4%, health care spending ballooned to 17.6% of our nation's budget, up a full 1% from 2008.  This percentage point jump was the largest in a half century of record keeping by the government.  Most of the increased costs were due to increased Medicaid costs as the recession forced more Americans to seek assistance.  Remember, all of this predates last year's health reform law. Follow this link to read the entire CMS report.
1/11/11

According to a study by the Center for Studying Health System Change, community based, private practice physicians own or lease advanced imaging equipment and in-office invasive surgery equipment as follows:
  • 25.2 percent reported owning or leasing equipment for laboratory services
  • 17.4 percent reported owning or leasing advanced imaging equipment, such as CT or MRI machines
  • 28.9 percent reported owning or leasing equipment for non-invasive procedures
  • 11.4 percent reported owning or leasing equipment for for invasive procedures, such as cardiac catherization
Policy makers have long been concerned that physicians with ownership or other financial interests in medical facilities and equipment would make more referrals than medically necessary.  Would you do so, if you had a large interest payment coming due and needed more business to make the payment or simply felt you needed to make more money?
1/12/11

Geoffrey Spurling and colleagues have published a study looking at the $57.5 billion that pharmaceutical companies spent on drug promotion in the United States in 2004.  Their conclusion: "With rare exceptions, studies of exposure to information provided directly by pharmaceutical companies have found associations with higher prescribing frequency, higher costs, or lower prescribing quality ..."  They recommend that doctors have no contact with pharmaceutical salespeople.
11/01/10

Joblessness and the accompanying loss of health benefits drove an additional 3.7 million people into state Medicaid programs last year according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Enrollment in the programs grew by 8.2 percent from December 2008 to December 2009, the second-largest rate of increase in the 10 years that Kaiser has conducted the survey. There were 48.5 million people on Medicaid at the end of 2009, or about one of every six Americans.
10/8/10

The U. S. Census Bureau announced that the number of Americans without health insurance coverage rose from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, while the percentage of uninsured citizens increased from 15.4 percent to 16.7 percent over the same period.  These figures are expected to rise until 2014; that is the year that The Affordable Care Act begins to lower the number of the uninsured.
9/22/10

According to a new survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, employees' share of the cost of a family health insurance policy jumped by an average of 14% or about $500 last year as employers shifted more costs onto them.  Workers are now paying almost $4000 per year for family coverage, and their costs have been rising much faster than have those of their employers.  This trend is expected to continue for the next fiscal year.
9/21/10

Researchers publishing in The Archives of Internal Medicine "found a massive, dramatic system failure" when studying orthopedists who were all paid more than $1 million by medical device manufacturers but who then routinely failed to disclose this conflict of interest in their articles in medical journals.  The medical journals all promise stricter guidelines concerning conflicts of interest.  See this review article in the New York Times if you don't have a subscription to the Archives.
9/16/10

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its yearly report on the performance of health systems in OECD countries.  The United States most significantly underperfoms in primary care medicine.   For example, we do poorly in preventing costly hospital admissions for chronic conditions, such as asthma or complications from diabetes, which should normally be managed through proper primary care.  This leads to excess morbidity, mortality, and unnecessary expense.  The culprit?  An inadequate primary care network caused by our skew in reimbursement toward procedures.  See our page Rescuing Primary Care and Fixing our System.
12/10/09
 
Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study. The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. The study appears in the November issue of Archives of Surgery. 
11/17/09

According to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 56% of Americans state that they or their family members skipped needed medical care because of its cost over the past year.  44% relied on home remedies or OTC medicines instead of going to the doctor, and 28% skipped a recommended test or treatment.  Not surprisingly, the poll found that the uninsured had the most difficulty meeting their medical expenses.  
9/30/09

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year, or one every 12 minutes, in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care according to a well designed study just published in The American Journal of Public Health.  Overall, researchers concluded that American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.  Please click link above to view abstract.  
9/19/09

The authors of America's first-ever national random-sample survey of bankruptcy filers published their findings in this month's issue of The American Journal of Medicine.  The survey found that over 62% of our country's bankruptcies are due to a medical cause.  Three quarters of bankruptcy filers had active health insurance and most were members of our middle class.   Furthermore, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 50% between 2001 and 2007.  6/13/09