Health IT company Castlight has launched a mobile app that allows patients to comparison-shop for physician and hospital services. Users have access to location services, price comparisons, provider ratings, and personalized searches for their specific insurance plans.
Read more on IT apps by Michael Millenson.
Commonly referenced reports maintain that the United States has inferior health outcomes compared to other countries, despite its higher health care spending per capita. But according to an American Enterprise Institute study, these conclusions are the result of shoddy research. For example:
Teenage mothers are more likely to have preterm, low-birth-weight babies. The mortality rate for infants born to U.S. teenage mothers is 1.5 to 3.5 times as high as the rate for infants born to mothers ages twenty-five to twenty-nine. The US rate of births for teenage mothers is very high — 2.8 times that of Canada and 7.0 times that of Sweden and Japan. If the United States had the same birth weights as Canada, its infant mortality rate — adjusting for this variable alone — would be slightly lower than Canada’s (5.4 versus 5.5 per one thousand births).
Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Hopefully Families USA will get the hint. The advocacy group is out with yet another study in its “Dying for Coverage” series claiming the link between uninsurance and mortality. The report asserts that over 26,000 working-age Americans die prematurely each year because they lack health insurance. Families USA derives its flimsy results, based on the years 2005 to 2010, from extrapolations of the inaccurate numbers presented in a 2002 Institute of Medicine study. The NCPA has previously addressed the flaws of the IOM study, a 2008 Families USA report, and the assertion that uninsurance causes death here, here, here, and here.
Shame on Reuters, The Hill’s “Healthwatch” and CNN for perpetuating this fallacy. See Chris Jacobs’ post on the issue.
