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Health care costs are lower for patients treated by female surgeons versus those treated by male surgeons, according to a study published online Nov. 29 in JAMA Surgery. Christopher J. D. Wallis, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Toronto, and colleagues examined associations between surgeon sex and costs of surgical care using data from 1.2 million adult patients undergoing one of 25 common elective or emergent surgical procedures from 2007 through 2019. The researchers found that at the procedure-specific level and when adjusting for patient-, surgeon-, anesthesiologist-, and hospital-level covariates, one-year total health care costs were higher for patients treated...

The first step towards slowing the rising cost of health care is blocking all the scammers abusing the system. Unfortunately, Congress is reluctant because scammers masquerade as respectable job creators, who make campaign donations to protect their gravy train. Our health care system has high premiums due to high medical prices. This results in anemic employee raises because too many stakeholders are looting the health care store. The cost of these scams are mostly borne by workers enrolled in employee health plans. What are some of the frequent scams? Surprise medical bills are perpetuated by a few bad apples from...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must be blind. She’s actually advocating that she and her fellow Democrats nationalize the medical supply chain and is holding the third coronavirus relief bill hostage until she and her party get what they want. She wants us to believe that this is the only solution to meet the growing need for goods to combat the coronavirus. What this is truly about is her and her colleagues’ own arrogance and quest for government expansion and control of the economy -- an obvious power grab that’s clearly designed to exploit the COVID-19 national emergency. Is Pelosi so...

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally. And this is why the shameless pandering to robber baron corporations posing as “health providers” is such an egregious … and obvious … tactic to do nothing more than plump up insurance company profits. And do you know who’s to blame? Believe it or not, the downfall of the American health insurance system falls squarely on the shoulders of former President Richard M. Nixon. In 1973, Nixon did a personal favor for his friend and campaign financier, Edgar Kaiser, then president and chairman of Kaiser-Permanente. Nixon signed into law, the Health...

Hospitals will be required to post online a list of their standard charges under a rule finalized Thursday by the Trump administration. While hospitals are already required to make this information public on request, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said the new rule would require the info be posted online to "encourage price transparency" and improve "public accessibility." Starting Jan. 1, hospitals will be required to update the information annually. The CMS said it is also considering how to "allow consumers to more easily access relevant healthcare data and compare providers." Increasing price transparency has been a...

There’s are a lot of liberals frothing at the mouth over the Trump administration’s decision to end the unconstitutional subsidies to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act last week. The subsidies were given to insurance companies to help offset costs from lower-income individuals concerning deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses. It's meant to prevent premium spikes. And the termination of this subsidy is not just a conservative view or action item, by the way. It’s the opinion of the courts, as the LA Times reported back in May of 2016–it’s unconstitutional: House Republicans won Round 2 in a potentially historic...

It wasn’t that long ago when one of the reasons people from the US were afraid to move to places like Mexico and Panama was because of the fear of substandard healthcare. Now, one of the reasons people from the US do move to places like Mexico and Panama is because of access to what is generally acknowledged to be comparable quality healthcare at a discount of from 50% to 75%+. In our study, Expat Report: How is Healthcare Abroad? we asked expats who had moved to Panama, Nicaragua and Belize their opinions on the cost of healthcare they received...

Prices for medicine, doctor appointments and health insurance rose the most last month since 1984. The price increases come amid a broader debate about climbing health care costs and high premiums for Obamacare coverage. [Snip] Medical care costs altogether rose 1% just in August from July, according to the Consumer Price Index, a report on price inflation from the U.S. Labor Department.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sided with a company that amended a collective bargaining agreement to force retirees to pay toward healthcare costs, throwing out a lower-court ruling that favored the former employees who objected to the change. On a unanimous vote, the nine-member court handed a win to M&G Polymers USA, a subsidiary of Italy-based chemical company Mossi & Ghisolfi International, by sending the case back for further proceedings in the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Nearly 500 plaintiffs from Ohio who had worked at the M&G polyester plant in Apple Grove, West...

The Obama administration is actually pleading with people to shop around before choosing a health insurance plan. Ordinarily that would be good advice. Ideally, people should comparison shop – considering the differences in premiums, subsidies, and networks of the different plans. But as I wrote at Forbes this week, there’s one big problem: Intelligent comparison shopping is virtually impossible. The Obama administration calls the health insurance exchanges “markets.” But they are unlike any market you have ever encountered. Think about what you would have to consider to make a reasoned choice. For starters, you have to consider all the health...

The second open enrollment period for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is underway, and the law is more unpopular than ever. According to Gallup, a record-high 56 percent of Americans now disapprove of the 2010 law.on Friday the administration unveiled a new one: In large swaths of the country, the price of insurance sold on the federal health exchange is going up. That will force many of those who bought coverage last year to scramble to find a new policy or fork over as much as 20 percentin higher premiums. How's that "affordable" health care working out for you?Republicans...

Time to inject another set of data points into the "Obamacare is working well in the real world" debate. The president and his loyalists insist that their signature law is working as intended. The general public -- yet again -- disagrees, according to a new poll from Politico. A plurality believes the quality of their care will deteriorate under Obamacare (perhaps due to access shock, doctor shortages, and government rationing decisions), while less than one-in-five expect improved care. On costs, a pitiful seven percent believe the 'Affordable' Care Act will reduce the amount of money they'll personally pay will decrease...

Have you heard about the insurance company that provides free health coverage for the poor? Me neither. What about the hospital that provides free health care services to the poor? Of course, you say. Many of them do! Indeed, some of these hospitals even go bankrupt in the process. It is beyond the scope of this article to discern how economic values are set in a society, but rest assured that supply and demand are but one factor—especially in health care. Notably, health care is the most regulated industry in the country. With compliance comes massive additional costs, not to...

While President Obama diverts the nation's attention with his other myriad scandals, the Obamacare Express continues to careen off the rails, leaving a wide path of destruction and rendering its supporters defenseless. The latest outrage, in a yearslong string, is that at least 4 million of the 8 million total Obamacare sign-ups contain flawed applications, according to a report by House Republicans. But this isn't some arbitrarily divined number chosen by Republicans for political purposes. It is based on a chart prepared by federal Obamacare contractor Serco that shows more than 4 million application discrepancies as of May 27. These...

The defects of the Obamacare website have become well known. But the problems with the law go further than the website. These problems are not incidental, but central to its design and the intentions of its architects. Many Obamacare backers, including Barack Obama, would prefer "single-payer" health insurance. The government would pay for everything and you would get health care for free. There is an inconsistency here with the way we treat other things regarded as the basics of life -- food, shelter, clothing. Government subsidizes food purchases only for some -- though a sharply increasing number in the Obama...

Pop quiz, no cheating allowed: if you had to guess, would you say that HIV and AIDS rates among gay men in the United States are A) declining, B) remaining stable, or C) rising? The correct answer is C) rising, at an alarming 8% per year . HIV incidence -- that is, the proportion of a population infected -- among gay men in the United States rises by that amount every year since at least 2001. Overall, this incidence, at 15.4% cumulatively, is just slightly lower than the incidence among gay men in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Three days of Supreme Court arguments have left the fate of the 2010 health care reform law uncertain. What is certain, however, is that health care costs are continuing to eat away at consumers' budgets. The cost to cover the typical family of four under an employer plan is expected to top $20,000 on health care this year, up more than 7% from last year, according to early projections by independent actuarial and health care consulting firm Milliman Inc. In 2002, the cost was just $9,235, the firm said. The projected increase marks the fifth year in a row that...

California is the 12th most expensive state based on its public policies that affect health care costs, according to a new ranking by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council. Health care cost is one of the hot-button issues facing the nation, but the new federal reform law is not the only factor in the cost of health care, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council notes.

President Obama on Friday defended the Democrats' healthcare law, saying the enormous expansion of insurance coverage made an increase in healthcare spending inevitable. "As a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people healthcare, at the margins that's going to increase our costs - we knew that," the president told reporters during a White House press conference. "We didn't think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free."

Video of Malkin on Hannity: "Every business owner in America should show up and stand up with those business owners and expose the costs of this DemCare burden." Amen!