VeinViewer helps IV needles hit the vein the first time
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This is a super cool piece of technology. The instrument uses a near-infrared light that penetrates just below the skin and reflects off blood vessels. VeinViewer senses hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component in blood, which an onboard computer uses to distinguish veins from arteries. It then projects an image of veins on the skin surface in [...]
Printing Muscle
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In a small clean room tucked into the back of San Diego–based startup Organovo, Chirag Khatiwala is building a thin layer of human skeletal muscle. He inserts a cartridge of specially prepared muscle cells into a 3-D printer, which then deposits them in uniform, closely spaced lines in a petri dish. This arrangement allows the [...]
Would Democrats Block a Republican Plan for Universal Coverage, Out of Spite?
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Avik Roy dives into the recent history of healthcare reform and details the bipartisan plan that the Democrats killed, in order to pass a partisan plan of their own. Hence, a bipartisan health-care agenda at the federal level will necessarily look quite different than one at the state level. If liberals had bothered to ask, [...]
How Doctors Are Trapped, Part II
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What is the common denominator for all of these problems? Unlike other professionals, doctors are not free to repackage and reprice their services in customer pleasing ways. The way their services are packaged is dictated by third-party-payer bureaucracies. The prices they are paid are similarly dictated. Doctors are the least free of any professional we deal with. Yet these un-free actors are directing one-fifth of all consumer spending!
How Doctors are Trapped
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Every lawyer, every accountant, every architect, every engineer — indeed, every professional in every other field — is able to do something doctors cannot do. They can repackage and reprice their services. If demand changes or if they discover a way of meeting their clients’ needs more efficiently, they are free to offer a different bundle of services for a different price. Doctors, by contrast, are trapped.
Hospital death-rate measurement method needs adjustment
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Drye and colleagues focused on mortality rates for patients with heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. For these conditions, one-third to one-half of deaths within 30 days occur after the patient leaves the hospital, but this proportion often varies by hospital.
The pill has benefits beyond birth control
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I want to like this article, I really do. After all, I support Dr. Potts’s main goal: making birth control pills available over-the-counter, without a prescription. It’s a good goal. But he’s dead wrong on one issue. So why isn’t the pill sold next to aspirin in every pharmacy or gas station? Commercial greed and [...]
It’s Not About Contraception
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This controversy is not about contraception. It’s about freedom versus compulsion.
Why Medicaid Is No Longer a Voluntary Program
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But EMTALA did more. It killed the voluntary nature of the Medicaid system.
Myth Busters #15: Easy-to-Understand Health Insurance?
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The fact is that health insurance is complicated because health care is complicated. Congress may think it can wave a magic wand and declare that it should be simple, but that is like passing a law that declares ice should not be so damned cold.