You’ve got to admit the past few days have been Washington nail biters. There was Obamacare (also called the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), slowly mounting the stairs to the guillotine. Up on the platform, blade-release rope in hand, was Donald Trump, quite GQ in his black Brioni and matching hood. The foul and hazy […]
Tag: Obamacare
Navigating Your Health Care Without Going Broke
Last week I talked about the problem many of you are facing with skyrocketing insurance premiums and deductibles so astronomical you wonder if you have any health insurance at all. We got into this fine pickle because: US healthcare prices are the highest in the world. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), […]
Obamacare: The Losers
In last week’s Health Tip we reviewed the groups that have done remarkably well with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called Obamacare. Unfortunately, three of the four big winners are industries enjoying record profits as a result of the new law–the health insurance industry, hospitals (and the physician practices they now […]
Obamacare: The Winners and The Losers
Despite the efforts of a few hardliners in Congress, it looks like Obamacare–the Affordable Care Act–is here to stay. After making its best effort to kill the bill at a fetal stage, the big guns of American healthcare (various medical associations, the American Hospital Association, Big Pharma, the health insurance industry) are now enjoying a […]
Obama Kvells, Docs Report Misery, and A Modest Proposal
Kvell is a Yiddish word meaning super happy and proud. My grandmother, for example, kvelled when I actually got my MD degree, even though she’d been calling me Dr. Edelberg since I was two. This week, it was President Obama’s turn to kvell. He’d received great news about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which, now […]
Four Reasons To Like Obamacare
Like everyone who works in health care, I’m both excited and nervous about what the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, will mean for both patients and practitioners. I like to view my excitement as an optimistic one, similar to the way people must have felt in the 1930s when Social Security guaranteed […]
Return of the Hundred Million Dollar Pen
Last week, pocket calculator panting from exhaustion, I explained how my humble pen, along with the pens of the other 899,999 physicians in America, was responsible for paying out about $2.24 trillion every year to thousands of health care “providers.” That’s the amount the US spends annually on our essentially mediocre healthcare system.