Healthcare Daily Digest for 6 February 2013: A Graphic Look at Where Our Healthcare Dollars Go

We talked before about the Americanly confusing way we go about spending on healthcare: too much money for pretty low quality care. Giving a helping hand with this argument are the fine folk over at NPR’s Planet Money: Health Care Spending In America, In Two Graphs.

Specifically, and through the magic of graphs, NPR wanted to know “Where, exactly, is all that [healthcare] money going? And, for that matter, where is the money coming from to pay for all that healthcare?”

Wednesday brings us these other headlines, too:

• About As Well As You’d Expect…: We start by checking in on Deborah Shapiro, a 76-year-old woman who switches from her former employer’s plan to Medicare. It…doesn’t go well.

• Obama Does Some Medicare House-Cleaning: “The Obama administration on Monday proposed eliminating certain obsolete Medicare regulations, a move it said would save hospitals and other healthcare providers an estimated $676 million a year, or $3.4 billion over five years.”

• Hottest Jobs in Healthcare!: And no, it’s not candy-striper or hunky anesthesiologists. “As a huge proportion of the population gets older, there will be a high demand for better health care services, cutting-edge technology, and new drugs — along with the doctors, nurses, lab researchers, technicians, and administrators who can propel the industry forward.”