Americans’ out-of-pocket healthcare costs are skyrocketing

For the majority of Americans who receive health insurance through their employers, there is some good news and some bad news. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank addressing health policy issues, released its annual Employer Health Benefits Survey on Wednesday and looked at the cost of insurance for Americans. Based on the data Kaiser gathered, it appears that the hit …

The Trouble with For-Profit Healthcare: Even the Insured Face Mountains of Debt

For one in five Americans, just having medical insurance isn’t enough to forestall the damaging consequences of the nation’s for-profit healthcare system. A comprehensive new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the New York Times finds that while an unsurprising 53 percent of people who are uninsured face problems with medical bills, a whopping 20 percent of working-age Americans …

MAYO CLINIC – Physicians and burnout: It’s getting worse

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Burnout among U.S. physicians is getting worse. An update from a three-year study evaluating burnout and work-life balance shows that American physicians are worse off today than they were three years earlier. These dimensions remained largely unchanged among U.S. workers in general, resulting in a widening gap between physicians and workers in other fields. The study conducted …

Paul Krugman – Despair, American Style

A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look …

In the future, your insurance company will know when you’re having sex – Kashmir Hill

First, insurance companies gave us black boxes to put in our cars so they could track our driving, in exchange for discounts when we refrain from speeding. Now, they’re coming for our bodies. The New York Times reports that John Hancock will be the first life insurance company that will offer discounts to Americans who agree to wear an activity tracker: People who sign up …

Consumers getting ‘skinned’ by health insurers

The reason health care costs are so high is because Americans don’t have nearly enough “skin in the game.” That was the phrase that many of my former colleagues in the insurance industry and I began using in the early 2000s as a way to deflect attention away from us. Americans — especially American employers — looked to private insurers …