More than 75 percent of physicians — and virtually all physicians in high-risk specialties such as obstetrics and gynecology and neurosurgery — face a medical-malpractice claim over the course of their career. While litigation costs are higher for claims that result in awards, litigation costs for claims that do not result in awards are still significant, averaging $17,130. Moreover, physicians spend an average of 11 percent of their careers with an unresolved malpractice claim, and claims that did not result in payments account for more than 70 percent of this time…

In the most recent peer-reviewed study, orthopedic surgeons recorded in real time whether imaging was required for clinical care or ordered for defensive reasons and found that physicians ordered 19.1 percent of imaging tests and 38.5 percent of MRIs for defensive reasons.

So what do they want to do about it? Let doctors off the hook if they practice cookbook medicine:

To reduce the costs of defensive medicine, the Center for American Progress proposes a “safe harbor” in medical-malpractice litigation to protect physicians if they:

• Document adherence to evidence-based clinical-practice guidelines
• Use qualified health information-technology systems
• Use clinical decision-support systems that incorporate guidelines to assist physicians with patient diagnoses and treatment options.

The biggest problem with these people is that they only talk to each other. At the NCPA we solved this problem a decade ago.

Our common perception is that retirement is a time when we can relax and take better care of ourselves after stressful careers. But what if work itself is beneficial to our health, as several recent studies suggest?

The evidence is mixed, but:

Examining the growing educational gradient in life expectancy from 1997 to 2006, Montez and Zajacova focused on white women ages 45 to 84. In addition to differential trends in smoking by education, they concluded that among these women “employment was, in and of itself, an important contributor.” The life expectancy of less-educated women was being shortened by their lower employment rates compared with those of highly educated women.

Sources: ‘Doing Business’; World Economic Forum; Fraser Institute. (More)

…After Ms. Lankford’s punch to the head, she asked her son’s doctors about his treatment. She received a standard answer: Privacy laws prevent his doctors from talking to her without his permission, because he is an adult. (More)

Since its inception in 2004, the ban has been criticized by many in the fertility industry, who blame it for the fact that the supply of sperm has virtually disappeared in Canada now that donors cannot be paid fees. Patients here obtain more than 90% of semen from the United States, and the federal government appears to turn a blind eye to the fact they buy it from mostly for-profit sperm banks — a criminal offence in this country. (More)

HT: Alex Tabarrok, who posts additional information.

• Singapore is 6th in the world in healthcare, but has 25% of the spending the U.S. has.
• Tertiary care is 80% public, while primary care is 80% private.
• Price transparency: Singapore has a law mandating that public and private caregivers post their prices.
• Singapore encourages competition among the public hospitals, but has certain regulations in place. The regulations were put in place after Singapore found that hospitals were spending a lot of money competing for higher class business by providing higher quality care. Average prices across the country increased. Some regulations include quotas requiring that they provide various qualities of care with various prices.
• Mandatory 401(k) and people use their savings to pay for whatever they need. Healthcare included. (My comment: Singapore has had mandatory medisave accounts since 1984.)

Video of talk at Brookings.

Coming: major shortage of primary care physicians.

At $112,000 per patient, Los Angeles leads the nation on spending in the last two years of life.

There is a 95% chance you are washing your hands incorrectly. (For males, its worse.)

ObamaCare will share personal health info with federal, state agencies.

But geneticists nationwide have gotten a few rude awakenings, hints that research subjects in fact could sometimes be identified by their DNA alone, or even by the way their cells were using their DNA. The latest shock came in January, when a researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to track down five people selected at random from a database using only their DNA, ages and the states in which they lived. And he did it in just hours. He also found relatives — a total of close to 50 people.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times.

The devil, as usual, lies in the details. Those details strongly suggest that the court’s distinction rests on very shaky scientific grounds — and can be explained more by political economy than by logic. (Noah Feldman/Bloomberg)

The less you know, the easier it is to solve this puzzle.

Personalized medicine comes to psychiatry.

60% of Massachusetts doctors will not meet state electronic record mandate.

Denmark’s fat tax harms the economy and produces little change in behavior.