Is A Better Way Actually Better?

Is Paul Ryan’s world view a place we want to live? We’re about to find out.In the current debate over the Affordable Care Act’s repeal and replacement, we are watching the collision of two world views.  While partisans on both sides are likely to disagree, here’s my mini sketch of Read more

By Jay Want, ago

Undoing American Healthcare

Why assuming we’re rational about health care may be a dangerous assumptionI am reading a wonderful book called The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, about the development of behavioral economics by two of its pioneers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  One point of their work over five decades is that Read more

By Jay Want, ago

Alternative Payment Model Shift

On April 27th, CMS released proposed rules for the implementation of the Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), an act that heretofore was famous for containing the repeal of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR).  The SGR was uniformly hated by physicians and other providers, as it theoretically controlled the rate Read more

By Jay Want, ago

If You’re Poor, Where You Live Matters

Originally featured on WantHealthcareLLC.com.In a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, economists from Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did a very interesting thing. There is a general assumption that the richer you are, the longer you live, on average. This turns out to be Read more

By Jay Want, ago

Why Are Prices So High in Health Care?

For many years we have been assuming that if Medicare costs were low in a particular region, like Grand Junction on our Western Slope, then commercial insurance (insurance like the kind many of us get through our employer) costs were also likely to be relatively low.  A recent report in Read more

By Jay Want, ago