January 18th, 2010 by RyanDuBosar in Better Health Network, Research
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Students exposed to songs with a positive message were more likely to help others after listening. A British study randomized students into groups who listened to socially conscious songs or those with negative or nonsense meanings. Then, a researcher pretended to knock pencils off the table by accident. Those who’d listened to positive songs helped more quickly and picked up almost five times as many pencils. Other subjects were asked to help with another research project, and three times as many volunteered.
Help! by the Beatles and Michael Jackson’s Heal the World were cited in the study, which is in press at the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Let us know your favorite “help” songs that get you through the day.
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
July 16th, 2009 by DrRob in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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It seemed like a reasonable plan.
I was having trouble keeping track of my chickens – they kept somehow escaping from their coop. So I figured that I would set guards to make sure none of them got out any more. I got some rabid wolves and put them outside of the coop, figuring that they would scare the chickens enough to stay in their place.
But here’s the problem: these rabid wolves are eating my chickens! Can you believe it?? You would think they’d have the moral decency to respect the fact that I hired them to guard my chickens, but now they try to bite me whenever I go out there! It’s amazing to me that these wolves would act in such a way. What’s the world coming to when you can’t trust rabid wolves to guard your chickens??
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What? You think I’m crazy? Take a look at our healthcare system! This is exactly what we are doing with our healthcare dollars.
In a recent article, Ezra Klein (coincidentally mentioned in two consecutive posts) discussed Wendell Potter, a disillusioned insurance executive who shared why he left the industry. Potter explained that the for-profit insurance industry (Cigna in this case) uses the following tactics to maximize profits:
The industry, Potter says, is driven by “two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”
So it seems that a for-profit company is in it for the profit. Disgusting. Klein goes on:
The best way to drive down “medical-loss,” explains Potter, is to stop insuring unhealthy people. You won’t, after all, have to spend very much of a healthy person’s dollar on medical care because he or she won’t need much medical care. And the insurance industry accomplishes this through two main policies. “One is policy rescission,” says Potter. “They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment.”
So the insurance industry is “cherry-picking” healthy people to insure – people they won’t have to pay much on – and dumping unhealthy people. How can this happen? How can the insurance industry be taking money from the system and using it for their own profits?
But who is actually the problem here? Are the Wolves evil for eating my chickens? No, they are just acting like wolves. I am the fool for trusting them to watch my chickens without getting taking advantage of their position. Putting for-profit insurance companies in charge of huge sums of money is just as foolish. As Klein states:
The issue isn’t that insurance companies are evil. It’s that they need to be profitable. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. And as Potter explains, he’s watched an insurer’s stock price fall by more than 20 percent in a single day because the first-quarter medical-loss ratio had increased from 77.9 percent to 79.4 percent.
Actually, I think Mr. Klein understates it a touch. It isn’t that the insurance companies need to be profitable; they are under huge pressures from shareholders to maximize their profits. They are being pressured to milk as much money from the system as possible. Maggie Mahar underlines this fact:
Potter is right. Disappointed shareholders can be brutal. And it doesn’t take much to disappoint them. In this case investors sent the share price plummeting because the insurer had the poor judgment to increase the amount that it paid out to doctors, hospitals and patients by 1.5 percent.
Even if an intelligent CEO wanted to do the right thing, take the long-term view, and provide labor intensive chronic disease management so that, over the long term, customers would be healthier—the CEO of a large publicly-traded insurance company probably wouldn’t keep his job long enough to find out whether or not his ideas worked. This helps explain why for-profit insurers have not followed the example of non-profit insurers and created “accountable care organizations” like Geisinger or InterMountain.
Those who have followed this blog have heard me say it before: the system won’t change until we stop trusting for-profit insurance companies to guard the money. Those who are morally indignant over the fact that these companies would milk the system as they do are blustering in the wrong direction. You don’t blame wolves for acting like wolves, and you don’t blame for-profit publicly-held companies for trying to maximize profit. They are just being themselves. We are the idiots – assuming they could be trusted in this position.
Obviously, the best solution is to put the politicians and lobbyists in charge. Surely they are trustworthy.
Image Credit
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*
November 4th, 2008 by Dr. Val Jones in Health Tips, True Stories
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I’m grateful to the Happy Hospitalist for pointing out that color matters when it comes to food consumption. As it turns out, blue light can be an appetite suppressant. And I actually know about this first hand.
I helped to design a research study in connection with Architectural Digest and the Parsons School of Design several years ago. I was a volunteer instructor for a hospital design course in NYC, and wanted to show the students that lighting could influence eating patterns. As it happened, there was a big gala event at a local convention center, and so I worked with my friend Shashi Caan to set up three identical rooms bathed in three different colored lights (yellow, blue, and red).
We had all the gala attendees dress up in white bunny suits (you know, the kind you let patients wear in the OR) and shuttled them through the 3 rooms at regular intervals. The rooms could each hold about 40 guests and copious identical hors d’oeurves were offered.
Guess what we found? The most food was consumed in the yellow room, followed by red, and then a distant third was blue. About 33% fewer snacks were consumed in the blue room during the event (and yes we controlled the number of people in each room so they’d be equal). I found this quite fascinating, but unfortunately never published the results. You see, I didn’t receive IRB approval for any of it.
But the experiment did leave an indelible impression on my mind. As I thought about it, I realized that most fast food restaurants have yellowish interiors. From the golden arches to the lighting – companies like McDonald’s probably recognized (long before I did) that color influences purchasing and eating behavior.
Yep, I’m late to this party – and I’m not painting my kitchen yellow.
