The Consumer: Bargaining Down That CT Scan Is Suddenly Possible
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Medical care is often priced with the same maddening, arbitrary opacity as airline seats and hotel rooms.
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High-definition television can  show the sweat beading on an athlete's brow, but the cost of  all the necessary electronic equipment can get a shopper's own  pulse racing.
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Consumer-directed health care (CDHC) - high-deductible plans often touted as the answer to spiraling health care costs - is not likely to curb health care costs, and could even worsen health outcomes by reducing patients&#39; receipt of needed preventive care
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People who pay for whole-body X-ray scans in the hope of finding tumors at their earliest stages may, ironically, be raising their overall risk of cancer, doctors warned on Tuesday.
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Not So Fast Don't assume your spouse wants you to make medical decisions he or she can't make. When asked to select a health care proxy -- someone designated to make medical decisions for a person who is incapacitated -- one-third of married respondents chose someone other than their spouse,...
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Although it has been a long time coming, physicians are beginning to consider the Internet an integral part of their practice. For example, instantaneous
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A new study suggests that screening smokers and former smokers for lung cancer doesn't save lives or prevent advanced disease and may lead to unneeded and harmful treatment. But it's not the final word on CT scans.
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Restrictive hardware and convoluted rights management crimp consumer choices.
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Better health care and fraud protection may sound good, but are they worth the potential privacy trade-offs?
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A new website is being launched in an attempt to strengthen patient choice.
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Description: We consider the effects of full body CAT scans on healthy people. New research says that elective full-body computed tomography, or CT, scans, can increase a person&#39;s risk of cancer.
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Unpredictable hospital billing can lead to financial anxiety about the prospect of dealing with insurance companies even before a surgery has happened.
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Dying of lung cancer, Carolyn Hobbs tried a new biotechnology drug that produced an unanticipated side effect: acute sticker shock. She was waiting for her second treatment in a hospital near Denver less than two years ago, when someone from the business office marched in to warn that her share would cost more than $18,000, since the drug wasn't insured for her type of cancer.
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With soaring insurance costs squeezing workers and employers, votersâ choices this November may well be swayed by an issue that has great personal significance to Americans and their pocketbooks: health care.
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Every day, consumers plunk down millions of dollars for cell phones, computers and high-end electronics that are supposed to make their lives better. And every night, they lie awake worrying that their new PCs or plasma TVs will spontaneously combust the day their warranty expires.
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I noted yesterday that there seems to be some media fanfare surrounding Amazon's launch of a digital book tablet. It occurred to me that the markets surrounding media such as books, music and movies bear more than a passing resemblance to financial markets, and as such, perhaps they were amenable to a similar method of analysis. Being the owner of a sizable collection of paper books, this led me to consider the drawbacks one faces when Digital Rights Management restrictions are put in place.
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Consumers face what many health care experts describe as two distinct tracks of care for those lucky enough to have insurance through their employer.