Why We Must Ration Health Care - NYTimes.com

Why We Must Ration Health Care - NYTimes.com:

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?

If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.

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In praise of placebos - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

In alternative treatments, patients are told that “it will take time to regain your health.” Granted sufficient cultural authority, chiropractors and other alternative medicine practitioners could dissuade patients from risky and painful medical tests, dependence on addictive drugs and needless surgeries.

This makes what chiropractors do secondary to what they prevent. True natural healing may involve distracting patients with a good story and avoiding medical interference. Spinal manipulation at least gives patients time, reassurance and permission to recover — without a costly back surgery that often has no greater probability of success than time and encouragement. (Of course, alternative medicine can become the new dependence — and the new form of bloated expenditure — as “regaining health” creeps into ongoing treatment for “maintaining health.”)

The greater theme here is that so much of our health and well-being lies in our connection with others. My study found that people receiving care — even if it was sham therapy in a control group — showed greater improvement over those stuck on a waiting list.

The logical conclusion is that we are more resilient and more likely to recover if we have a plausible explanation of why we hurt and when the pain might end, and if we know that someone cares. How many other conditions might also require just patience, community and time to heal?

In praise of placebos - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Why More, Not Fewer, People Might Start Getting Health Insurance Through Work - NYTimes.com

Why More, Not Fewer, People Might Start Getting Health Insurance Through Work - NYTimes.com: "The law’s best-known and least-liked provision — the “individual mandate” — is probably causing the trend. For the first time, people must buy insurance this year or be subject to a tax penalty. In Massachusetts, a similar requirement changed the employer-sponsored insurance market in two ways, said Sharon Long, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who has studied the state’s experience.

First, it encouraged more workers who were already being offered health insurance to take it — an effect roughly analogous to what Walmart is experiencing. Second, it actually induced more employers to offer coverage to their workers — because, Ms. Long believes, workers began to demand insurance once they were required to have it. Over all, the percentage of Massachusetts residents with employer-based insurance went to 65.6 percent in 2008, when the health care law was up and running, up from 61 percent in 2006."



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