Medicare << Back to Part I: How Insurance Works << Back to Part II: How Medical Insurance Was Broken Thanks for sticking with the series so far. I know the last section was long and technical and I appreciate you slogging throug...

How Medical Insurance Was Broken << Back to Part I: How Insurance Works In the last post we learned the legitimate valuable role that insurance plays in collectivizing risk.  In this post I will explain how that model broke for health insurance and how we are still suffering the consequences. It seems i...

How Insurance Works For many families healthcare is increasingly expensive while simultaneously increasingly mediocre.  A recent study in the American Journal of Medicine found that two thirds of bankruptcies were due in part to medical expenses, and surprisingly, over three quarters of the individuals going bankrupt had health insurance.  There is no denying that the Am...

When many of us get a headache, a fever, or just suffer the aches and pains of physical exertion we don’t think twice about reaching for an over-the-counter pain reliever.  Acetaminophen, which is the medicine in the well-known brand Tylenol, has long been considered the safest pain medication.  Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) can cause stomach irritation and ulcers and can de...

For the last few years the future of primary care has been looking bleak.  Fewer and fewer medical students are choosing primary care careers, just as baby-boomers retire and will need more care.  Primary care physicians meanwhile are retiring early or cutting back their practices at record numbers, worsening the coming shortage. The current issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine publi...

Folic acid, a vitamin found naturally in green leafy vegetables and legumes, is essential for making the building blocks of DNA.  And since copying DNA is an important part of what cells do before they divide, it’s critical for cell division.  Developing fetuses have very rapidly dividing cells, so it’s not surprising that folic acid deficiency has been linked to birth defects, specificall...