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Latest Posts

How Bad The Government Is At Selling Insurance (Or Is It?)

Did you know there is actually a “public option” in the health care reform law?  It’s true — it’s called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), and it’s designed to cover people who who have been unable to get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. To hear the stories about how big of a problem this is in America, you’d think a product like this would be a big hit. Except it’s been a big flop.

How big of a flop? Well, according to the Washington Post, they missed their sales targets by 98 percent:

Government economists had projected that people turned down by private insurers would flock to the new Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, with 375,000 expected to sign up this year. But as of this week, a little more than 8,000 had enrolled, officials said.

According to the Post, it seems the government has figured out what they think the problem is: “sticker shock.” The price was too high. So they’re dropping the price by 20 percent and significantly enhancing the benefits. But can that really be the problem? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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