August 2009

Americans and insurers are getting creative in their efforts to save money and drive down the cost of healthcare. Medical tourism, or in plain English, traveling abroad to receive necessary or elective medical services is growing in popularity. Procedures done overseas can be done for thousands and sometime tens of thousands of dollars less and with much the same outcomes as those done in the states, but it's not without its risks.

Cost transparency or our ability to comparison shop for medical services was recently made much easier by insurers in Oregon. Along with some other useful tools health insurance companies now include on their websites the ability for insureds to estimate the cost of, and shop for, the best deal on medical procedures.
This Oregonian article comments on a few of the more popular Oregon insurers. See how your company ranks.

Love Kaiser or hate Kaiser one cannot deny the unique advantages that their healhcare financing model presents. The Oregonian recently hailed the group practice model HMO as a model for healthcare reform.

Canada is often sited as a model for healthcare reform so we thought you might like to see some interesting statistics, provided by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), about where Canada and the U.S. rank amongst other industrialized nations when it come to healthcare.