Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

Effective Strategies to Reduce Costs and Utilization in US Healthcare

March 24, 2020 | Economy

How to Reduce US Healthcare Costs  (Published March 18, 2020) Our healthcare costs keep increasing much faster than inflation, year after year. According to figures released in December 2019 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the annual growth rate of healthcare spending was 4.6% in 2018, vs. 3.9% in 2017, 4.8% …

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Should Our Government Use Wellbeing Statistics?

August 21, 2019 | Wellbeing Indicators

Should our government use wellbeing indicators? “Our Gross National Product…counts air pollution and cigarette advertising…special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars …

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Climate Change Imperatives Will Drive the Future of Transportation

July 20, 2019 | Climate Change

Climate change demands lower carbon dependency in electricity generation and transportation, by far the two largest global economic sectors in terms of energy use. Clean power solutions already exist: Today 40% of U.S. power generation comes from non-fossil sources, and the electric power sector consumption of fossil fuels is at its lowest level since 1994—25 years of …

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Addressing Harvard Alumni in the Bay Area

June 25, 2019 | Alumni

HBS CAREER COACHES HIT THE ROAD TO SERVE ALUMNI Northern California Alumni Consider the High Cost of Complexity, HBS AA Article by Margie Kelley (June 2019): Though the United States currently spends approximately $3.5 trillion a year on health care—the equivalent of the entire GDP of the world’s fourth-largest economy—our life expectancy has decreased for the …

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The Future of Healthcare: Interview Published in Authority Magazine on June 5, 2019

June 14, 2019 | Healthcare

The Future of Healthcare: “We must free medicare to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies” with Etienne Deffarges, serial healthcare entrepreneur Christina D. Warner Jun 5 Cut the cost of drugs. We need to stop protecting our pharmaceutical companies by freeing their largest purchaser, Medicare, to negotiate with them, and allowing lower-cost imports from reputable countries. U.S. Drug …

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Ending Surprise Medical Bills, and Removing a Stain on U.S. Healthcare

May 21, 2019 | Surprise medical billing

How Will Legislation Ending Surprise Medical Bills Affect U.S. Healthcare Costs?    Erasing a stain on our medical system, and reducing costs as well—by how much?   On Thursday May 9, I was watching one of the business TV channels to learn about the status of our trade war with China, and the anchor announced …

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Has U.S. Health Care Spending Finally Stabilized?

February 3, 2019 | ACA

Has U.S. Health Care Spending Finally Stabilized? An Outlook for 2019 The official 2017 statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) are out, and there are some good news: The annual growth rate of health care spending is slowing down, and is the lowest since 2013 at 3.9%—it was 4.8% for …

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Obamacare in the next few years

January 29, 2019 | ACA

The Future of the Affordable Care Act: Unscathed by Attacks from the Right, Overtaken on its Left? Having survived years of attacks from Republicans, will the surviving ACA be rendered obsolete by Democrats’ local and state efforts towards universal health care? This could be an ironic twist of fate for Obamacare. Conceived out of the …

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Why ACA Enrollment is Down This Year

December 15, 2018 | Affordable Care Act

Why ACA Enrollment is Down – and Why It Might Stay That Way  Enrollment in Obamacare is down this year Enrollment in Obamacare is down this year. Halfway through the sign-up period for ACA health care insurance plans, which ends on December 15, the federal website Healthcare.gov reported early in December that enrollment was down …

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The U.S. Government as a Leading Venture Capitalist

December 7, 2018 | U.S. Government

The U.S. Government as a Leading Venture Capitalist  Uncle Sam supports entrepreneurs  The U.S. Government as a leading venture capitalist, wow, is this a joke? This sounds like industrial policy, public intervention, and “picking winners.” It is something that European and East Asian governments do, but not us, right? Think again. The U.S. government has actually …

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