health care
Home pregnancy tests have been used for years – but in the near future we could be diagnosing dozens of diseases, from cancer to HIV, in the privacy of our own homes. Dr. Eugene Chan and Professor Andrew Ellington discuss what that means for doctors, patients, and health care costs. Read More...
Jon Gruber, the Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, explains how little innovations might save trillions of health care dollars. Read More...
For years, the fight against polio was considered one of the most successful vaccination campaigns of all time. But now, the reappearance of the disease in countries like Pakistan, Syria, and Cameroon has thrown that success into jeopardy. How was polio wiped out the first time around? Read more...
Has technology fueled the healthcare crisis? Amitabh Chandra, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, explains the real - but often overlooked - reasons for our healthcare problems. Read More...
Put down that low-fat yogurt! Dr. Robert Lustig says that sugar - not fat - may be the real culprit behind America's obesity epidemic. Read more...
When a pill costs more than the price of your house, is it really worth it? Barry Werth, author of "The Antidote," examines the astronomical costs of breakthrough drugs. Read more...
Is Jack Andraka the country's most famous high school student? We talk with the 15-year old winner of the Intel Science Talent Search, who developed an early means of detecting one of the world's deadliest cancers. Read more...
When journalist Steven Brill first began investigating the American health care system for his article "Bitter Pill, he started in a familiar place: medical bills. What he found shocked him. One patient, for example, paid $2,293 per day just for room and board in a hospital - about ten times more than he would have paid for a hotel room - and had little choice in the matter.
"There's no marketplace at all," Brill says. "The person buying the service has no leverage, no power, and no visibility into the cost."
This week, Innovation Hub is all about altruism in business. Meet one CEO who walks the walk: Michael Schrader of Vaxess Technologies, a company that uses silk protein to stabilize the temperature of vaccines so they can be shipped across the globe without refrigeration. In other words, with Schrader’s help, some of the 2.5 million people who die annually of preventable diseases could be saved using the fiber in your bedsheets.
