One of the most important changes Americans experienced with the onset of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was that a large suite of preventive services and treatments—from contraceptives to heart monitoring to mammograms—had to be covered in full by insurance policies. But a new ruling could change that.
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medicine
The US is on the verge of a devastating, but avoidable doctor shortage
In 1997, President Bill Clinton was coming off a convincing reelection effort and presiding over a booming economy. Tax revenues were surging, and the federal budget deficit was falling. During the preceding two years, the annual deficit had s...
Cancer drugs are way more expensive in the US than other countries
Cancer is the second-leading cause of death, just behind heart disease. In 2018, it killed 9.6 million people globally. The same year, there were over 18 million new cases of cancer worldwide, and by 2040, that fi...
Bad UX is keeping hospital prices lists opaque despite new transparency law
Thanks to new US law, we now know the standard price for a cotton ball at the New York Presbyterian Hospital is $1.15. The list price for a skull X-ray at Orlando Health is $695 and NYU Langone’s average charge for a heart transplant is $1,698,831.13.
Unde...
Rich people are lowering cancer death rates in the US
The good news is, over the past quarter of a century, cancer deaths have been on the decline in the US. The bad news is, not everyone benefited equally.
According a report published Tuesday (Jan. 8) by researchers at the Ameri...
The most screwed-up employee perk in America (and the man who just might fix it)
The last time Atul Gawande started a company, he named it after a Greek myth.
Ariadne Labs, based in Boston, Massachusetts—where Gawande also works as a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and teaches at Harvard—has been trying since 2012 to innovate in an area that has historically resisted innovat...
How AI changed organ donation in the US
There used to be only three ways off of a kidney transplant waiting list. The first was to find a healthy person from within one’s own pool of friends and family, who perfectly matched both the recipient’s blood and tissue types, and possessed...
America is running out of OB/GYNs
There aren’t enough Ob-GYNs in America, and soon there will be even fewer. Half the counties in the US don’t have any practicing OB-GYNs. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) puts the current shortage at 6,000 to 9,000 OB-GYNs countrywide, a numb...
