Category Archives: Health Insurance

Saving Money on Medical Care

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 21st August 2009

Here’s an intelligent article on the realities of new health care legislation  posted at a surprising sight. Well worth reading. Remember if a new program can’t reduce the ruinous cost increase of medical care it’s not worth doing. The Health Care Cost Saving Myth


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Healthcare Cuts in British Columbia

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 18th August 2009

Read this article to see what happens to government health insurance. It’s another example of less healthcare costing more resulting in even less medical care. Drastic health cuts coming in Vancouver: B.C.


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Healthcare Abroad and at Home

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 7th August 2009

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about healthcare in France. It details the financial difficulties that France’s national healthcare plan is experiencing. The data on this graph need a little explaining. It presents the percentage change in medical (not health as it states) cost in four countries. To accurately analyze the data you…


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Draft of House Health Insurance Bill

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 31st July 2009

If you are addicted to punishment you might want to page through the draft of the House’s health insurance bill. Not only have most congressmen not read it, they would have to understand bureaucratease – the language in which the bill is written. This is the June 19th version and comes in at a concise…


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Effectiveness and Cost

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th June 2009

There’s a growing sentiment that a solution to out of control medical costs might be to limit reimbursement of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that are deemed to be of little or no effectiveness. I’ve written earlier that this is rationing of medical care in disguise. But let’s look at his issue in a little more…


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The Rashomon Approach to Medicare

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 10th June 2009

The May 28 number of the New England Journal of Medicine published three perspective pieces which show how hard it is to discuss anything to do with federal funding of medical care. The authors, all PhDs, were invited to write these articles presumably because they know a lot about the subject. I’ve already stated my…


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Evidence Based Reimbursement

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th June 2009

It didn’t take long. The day after I wrote that Evidenced Based Medicine would be used to ration medical care the June 8 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine appeared on my desk. Under the heading of Health Care Reform is “A 300-Year-Old Solution to the Health Care Crisis”. In it Diamond, et al…


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More on Medicare's Administrative Costs

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 2nd June 2009

I’ve previously written on how Medicare drastically underestimates its administrative costs. Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,has analyzed these costs a different way and concluded that administrative costs under a single payer scheme would be twice those of today’s health insurance. He doesn’t really count the hidden costs that I was carrying…


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Medical Tourism

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 6th April 2009

The NY Times recently published a story about medical tourism. You can read it for yourself. What’s most interesting about the phenomenon and what’s not mentioned specifically is that it is an attempt to establish market economics in medical care. Note again that health care is a terrible misnomer that distracts attention from the real…


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Medicare's Overhead

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th December 2008

Rep Pete Stark chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s health panel is once again on the warpath.  The California Democrat delivered his latest zinger last week, saying he wouldn’t negotiate with insurance companies on a health-care overhaul. “I think their intention is to see the Democrats fail, regardless of what it does for…


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