Jeffrey Kreisberg

Cancer is expensive — the American Cancer Society estimates that the 2010 total cost of cancer in the U.S. soared to $263.8 billion. These costs can drive people to financial ruin.

High cost drugs used to treat relatively few people suffering from complex conditions like anemia, cancer, hemophilia, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and human growth hormone deficiency are often the most expensive, costing thousands of dollars for each prescription.

Congress is either stupid or they're trying to pull a fast one. They continue to scare seniors with the malarkey that the Medicare trust fund will soon become “insolvent.”

Two U.S. senators have introduced legislation to overturn a 1979 court injunction that bars the government from revealing what individual physicians earn from Medicare.

Wouldn’t you want to know just how safe your hospital is before you’re admitted for a procedure? How about if I told you that preventable medical errors were responsible for over 90,000 deaths a year in our nation’s hospitals?

During the healthcare reform debates of 2009, there were angry confrontations that nothing in the legislation would address rising healthcare costs.

It’s been estimated that fraud adds as much as $60 billion a year to our healthcare costs. Well, the problem has gotten the attention of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) which is tasked with protecting the integrity of the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the health and welfare of program beneficiaries.

With access to the Medicare claims database to track Medicare expenditures, the Wall Street Journal recently reported, as part of a series on Medicare expenditures, that the Norton Hospital in Louisville, Ky., performed the third-most spinal fusions on Medicare patients in the country!

Despite recommendations by healthcare accrediting agencies like the Joint Commission and the prestigious Institute of Medicine, to reduce medical errors, the number of adverse medical events has continue to rise over the past decade.