Here are two citations from the invaluable Maggie Mahar over at healthbeatblog:
Health Beat: The “Top-Five” Ways to Improve Primary Care and Reduce Costs…. talks about how doctors have been able to stop unnecessary tests, and How Medicine became a growth business is an illuminating guest post by Dr. Clifton Meador about the history of medicine over the time since he began practicing in the early 1960’s. Anybody interested in the marketplace will be interested in this, though you may not agree with some of his opinions (the role of the “worried well”).
Over at KevinMd.com, Doug Perednia has a rousing discussion of the amount of non-health-care spending in the health-care marketplace: “In recent years, more and more of the revenue collected by U.S. healthcare facilities ends up paying for costs that have nothing to do with providing actual healthcare goods and services: things such as administration, billing, documentation, and the cost of complying with thousands of rules and regulations.”
From the Commonwealth Fund: “The Affordable Care Act is making a difference for young adults, among the groups most at risk for lacking health insurance in the United States. Young adults up to age 26 may now stay on or join their parent’s health plans if they include dependent coverage, and early reports indicate that at least 600,000 have done so. Starting in 2014, of the 14.8 million uninsured adults ages 19 to 29, an estimated 12.1 million could gain subsidized coverage once all the law’s provisions go into effect: 7.2 million may gain coverage under Medicaid and 4.9 million may gain subsidized private coverage through state insurance exchanges. New findings from the 2010 Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey indicate the need for these reforms: 45 percent of young adults reported delaying needed care because of costs in 2010, up from 32 percent in 2001, and 39 percent reported problems paying medical bills. “
