Heart Health

Obesity or corpulence, is malnutrition more prevalent in developed countries. This health condition is like a spider’s web. Once you’re obese, you’re at risk of a variety of other health conditions, mental and physical.

It causes type 2 diabetes, heart diseases, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, depression etc. This is the sad cost of obesity. This translates to health care expenditures that are directly and indirectly caused by obesity.

In the United States, an estimated cost of obesity is 12% of the national health care budget, studied by the World Watch Institute and the World Bank. In a 1999 Lewin Group study commissioned by the American Obesity Association, the direct health care cost of obesity reached $102.2 billion. It shows a rise from 5.7% of the national health care budget directed to obesity (from a 1994 study) to the 9.8% of health expenses from the 1999 Lewin… Read More…

According to a recent study by the Cato Institute of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), there is no perfect scenario when it comes to health care.  On one side of the spectrum is the desire to have unlimited medical care to extend one’s life as much as possible, and the other end of the spectrum is to ration care to control spending.

The NHS is a centralized government version of the one-payer system in England, and it pays directly for health care and finances the system through general tax revenues.  Most physicians and nurses are government employees.  Below are some key statistics to keep in mind when looking at a government system without competition.

Waiting Times. Presently as many as three quarters of a million Britons are waiting to be treated in Britain’s hospitals. Cancer patients, for example, will wait as long as eight months before being treated.… Read More…

National health care might be a disaster, due to the cost and the complexity. A government-controlled system also creates agonizing moral dilemmas (read about the eye treatment ruling covered further down). Still, despite my opposition to it, I can see it’s a real possibility, and soon. Keeping that in mind, here is what we can do to solve some of the inherent problems and make the system work better.

What’s Your QUALYs Score?

Who gets what health care? That would be a tricky decision for any of us, but some might argue that the bureaucrats in the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) are pretty good at it. They are evaluate and approve treatments for the National Health Services administration in Britain (their national health care bureaucracy). After all, the life expectancy in Britain is about the same as in the United States, and the government spends less… Read More…

The United States is the only nation in the industrialized world without universal health care system. The oldest universal health care system is in Germany, which had its inception in 1883 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

Let’s lay a basic rule before we begin. Traditional insurance to cover unexpected but foreseeable events. For example, covers an auto policy, an unexpected collision. But that policy does not coverMaintenance costs are a normal part of owning a vehicle. Maintenance Insurance Health Insurance has become over the years to pay for everything from regular inspections and cleaning to heart transplants. And with some of the group insurance copays of $ 5 to $ 20, the concept of deductibles is too archaic.

So, when considering a single-payer cradle to grave government health services have the old concepts of insurance and risk are set aside. Single-payer health care is NOT Insurance in the true… Read More…