Hot MedFax

What's accomplished what a boatload of doctors, thousands of parents and a sometimes reviled mayor of a very big city couldn't do? We're talking, of course, about stopping kids -- or even adults -- from buying sugary sodas.  And it's the price. Apparently the increase in price s for these drinks has gotten some people to stop.  According to Nancy Hellmich at USA Today, "Raising the cost of high-calorie beverages by a few cents — and highlighting calorie content in places where they are sold — decreases sales, a new study shows." Researchers at Harvard chose the cafeteria of a financial services company to do the study. Hellmich reports they increased the price of high-calorie beverages (those that contained 150 calories or more per container), mostly soda, lemonade, whole chocolate milk, and some juices, by one cent per ounce. She writes that the price of low-calorie beverages (45 to 149 calories) and zero-calorie beverages stayed the same. "So a...

Want to know what a Heme-8 Lab costs? Or a Heme-8 with Automated Differentiated Lab?  They're each $9.37 at Johns Hopkins and it may not matter to you what they are (blood tests for diseases like lupus and others), or how much they cost. But it's starting to, for doctors, and it's helping to bring down healthcare costs, according to Sarah Kliff at The Washington Post.  She reports that, "for six months, doctors ordering certain lab tests" were able to "call up both the type of the test," and what Medicare would pay for it. It's actually caused doctors to order almost 10% fewer tests, Kliff notes.  Once the hospital started studying the costs, and relaying them to doctors, it saved $3.79 per test per day per patient.  That may not sound like much, but times thousands of patients, it's paying off. Kliff writes that doctors were not penalized for writing orders for more expensive tests, the price just got billed to the insurance company (and w...