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Allen recently read a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine that found female primary care physicians spend more time with their patients than male doctors — an average of 2.4 minutes per visit, to be specific. But female physicians still make less money

"The pay gap in medicine by gender is very well documented," Neprash says. "It's been written about for decades, but the understanding of what exactly drives that is pretty sparse."

The study's authors analyzed data from over 24 million primary care visits in 2017, digging deep into information from Athenahealth, an electronic medical records company that's widely used in primary care practices.

An estimated 100 million Americans have medical debts. Their bills make up about half of all outstanding debt in the country.

About 20 percent of hospitals nationwide have debt-collection policies that allow them to cancel care, according to an investigation last year by KFF Health News. Many of those are nonprofits. The government does not track how often hospitals withhold care

Under federal law, hospitals are required to treat everyone who comes to the emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. But the law — called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — is silent on how health systems should treat patients who need other kinds of lifesaving care, like those with aggressive cancers or diabetes.

There's widespread agreement that it's important to help older adults and people with disabilities remain independent as long as possible.

That's the challenge President Joe Biden has put forward with his bold proposal to spend $400 billion over eight years on home and community-based services — a major part of his $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

It comes as the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and group homes, killing more than 174,000 people, by some estimates, and triggering awareness of the need for more long-term care options.

I’m convinced that the ability to get good, if not great, care in facilities that aren’t competing with one another is the main way that other countries obtain great outcomes for much less money. It also allows for more regulation and control to keep a lid on prices.

Because of government subsidies, most people spend less than 25 percent of their income on housing and can choose between buying new flats at highly subsidized prices or flats available for resale on an open market.

Other social determinants that matter include food security, access to education and even race. As part of New Zealand’s reforms, its Public Health Agency, which was established less than a year ago, specifically puts a “greater emphasis on equity and the wider determinants of health such as income, education and housing.” It also specifically seeks to address racism in health care, especially that which affects the Maori population.

Gov. Greg Abbott told state health agencies in Texas on Tuesday that medical treatments provided to transgender adolescents, widely considered to be the standard of care in medicine, should be classified as “child abuse” under existing state law.

“all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers, and provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse.”

It is still unclear how and whether the orders, which do not change Texas law, would be enforced.

In most areas of the economy, free-market principles insure that products and services keep improving, and that consumers get better and better deals. But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.

the truth is that, despite the rhetoric, Romney’s main concern isn’t to bring down over-all health-care costs. In fact, he has regularly attacked one of the Affordable Care Act’s most aggressive cost-cutting measures—the independent board that can make binding recommendations on how to cut Medicare spending. What he wants is just to have the government less involved in health care. Insofar as his plans would lower federal health-care spending, it’s not because of the power of the free market; it’s because a Romney Administration would simply have the government do less. Romney would eliminate the Obamacare subsidies for health insurance. He would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states and trim its annual budget, with the result that its funding would lag behind the rise in health-care costs. And, if he adopts his running mate Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan for Medicare, he would make Medicare recipients pay higher premiums. With these changes, the government would spend less, but only because it would provide less, and Americans would get less. It’s like saving on defense by protecting only two-thirds of the country.

The real issue, come November 6th, isn’t about who has the best ideas for controlling health-care costs. It’s about who has the right idea of what government should do. ♦

Compared with peer nations, the United States sends people to the hospital less often, it has a smaller share of specialist physicians, and it gives people about the same number of hospitalizations and doctors’ visits, according to a new study. The quality of health care looks pretty good, it finds, while its spending on social services outside of health care, like housing and education, looked fairly typical.

a large and comprehensive review in The Journal of the American Medical Association punctures a lot of those pat explanations. The paper, conducted by a research team led by Ashish Jha, compiled detailed data from the health care systems of the United States and 10 other rich developed nations, and tried to test those hypotheses. The group included nations with single-payer health care systems, like Britain and Canada, and countries with competitive private insurance markets, like Switzerland and the Netherlands.

When it came to many of the measures of health system function, the United States was in the middle of the pack, not an outlie

Any significant reform would require major realignment of the health care sector, which is now the biggest employer in at least a dozen states. Most hospitals and specialists would probably lose money. Some, like the middlemen who negotiate drug prices, could be eliminated. That would mean job losses in the millions.

the point is to streamline for patients a Kafka-esque health care system that makes money for industry through irrational practices. After all, shouldn’t the primary goal of a health care system be delivering efficient care at a reasonable price

In 2012, the Harvard economists Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra warned against “treating the health care system like a (wildly inefficient) jobs program.” They were rightly worried that the health care system was the primary engine of recovery from the Great Recession

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk.

We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.

“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,”

There has been a perception that Black Americans are more hesitant than whites to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. But roughly equal proportions of Black and white respondents in a recent poll said they plan to get vaccinated.

25% of Black respondents and 28% of white respondents said they did not plan to get a shot.

misinformation and lack of access to health care are bigger impediments for Blacks than a hesitancy to get vaccinated.

When it comes to health policy, President Donald Trump made it his mission to undo many measures his predecessor put in place.

In their four years in office, the Trump administration made sweeping changes that affected the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, abortion and transgender rights, in many cases reversing the efforts of the Obama administration.

Biden's health officials will likely be active, as well, but it will take time for all their actions to take effect.

What is missing from the stampede of policy innovation is something to tackle one of the best-known causes of high costs in the book: excessive market concentration.

The share of metropolitan areas with highly concentrated hospital markets, by the standards of antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, rose to 77 percent from 63 percent over the period.

If there is one thing that economists know, it is that market concentration drives prices up — and quality and innovation down.

Modern conservatism, at least in its pre-Donald Trump incarnation, evolved to believe in a marriage of Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman, in which the wisdom of tradition and the wisdom of free markets were complementary ideas.

Both, in their different ways, delivered a kind of bottom-up democratic wisdom — the first through the cumulative experiments of the human past, the second through the contemporary experiments enabled by choice and competition.

In health care policy, however, conservatives tend to simply favor Friedman over Burke. That is, the right’s best health care minds believe that markets and competition can deliver lower costs and better care

Why are these other countries beating us if we spend so much more? The truth is that we may not be spending more

we broadened the scope of traditional health care industry analyses to include spending on social services, like rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support and other services that can extend and improve life.

We studied 10 years’ worth of data and found that if you counted the combined investment in health care and social services, the United States no longer spent the most money — far from it. In 2005, for example, the United States devoted only 29 percent of gross domestic product to health and social services combined, while countries like Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark dedicated 33 percent to 38 percent of their G.D.P. to the combination. We came in 10th.

Congress, End the Health Care Chaos. You Have 9 Million Kids to Protect.

President Trump and Republicans in Congress have brought chaos to the American health care system by trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act and failing to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which, with bipartisan support for the past 20 years, has provided care for millions of children.

Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray on Tuesday announced a bipartisan deal that could help stabilize the A.C.A.’s insurance markets and undo some of the damage Mr. Trump has done through administrative actions

Germany offers a health insurance model that, like Canada’s, results in far less spending than in the United States, while achieving universal, comprehensive coverage

this model, pioneered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883, was the first social health insurance system in the world. It has since been copied across Europe and Asia, becoming far more common than the Canadian single-payer model.

Germans are required to have health insurance, but they can choose between more than 100 private nonprofit insurers called “sickness funds.” Workers and employers share the cost of insurance through payroll taxes, while the government finances coverage for children and the unemployed.

Insurance premiums could spike as much as 40 percent next year, a new analysis warns, as employers and insurers confront the projected tens of billions of dollars in additional costs of treating coronavirus patients.

Mr. Lee’s organization estimated the total cost to the commercial insurance market, which represents the coverage currently offered to 170 million workers and individuals through private health plans.

Depending on how many people need care, insurers, employers and individuals could face anywhere from $34 billion to $251 billion in additional expenses from the testing and treatment of Covid-1

Just look, for instance, at this ad from the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, in which actors doing their best worried faces say, “Politicians may call it Medicare-for-all, Medicare buy-in or the public option, but they mean the same thing: higher taxes or higher premiums, lower quality care, politicians and bureaucrats in control of our care.”

Although a single-payer system obviously presents the greatest threat to their profits, their belief is that any reform that allows large numbers of people to move on to government programs makes genuine cost control more likely, and that’s what they want to avoid.

, the consultant “removed three paragraphs from a draft of Kelker’s op-ed that pointed out that the United States 'clearly spends significantly more on health care per capita than other developed nations.’” This is one of the most important facts about our health-care problem, but it’s the last thing the Partnership and its backers want anyone thinking about.

The fact that this decision has earned AOC the enmity of some influential progressive commentators reflects a pathological tendency within a small subset of the U.S. left — namely, a habit of mining anti-political cynicism out of its own naïveté.

A political tactic is only as moral as it is effective.

To see what I mean by this, it’s worth examining the most thoughtful case for Dore’s strategy in some detail.