Tom Emerick

Imagine an Accountable Fire Insurance Act that required insurers to sell you fire insurance after your home had burned.

What Walmart is doing is a huge step forward in truly controlling waste, overtreatment and misdiagnoses in health plans.

If you offer old-fashioned wellness, walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit. If you want to look at something that shows huge promise, check out Quizzify.

While wellness at work was a noble notion and one that made sense to many on the surface, it’s time for HR executives to 'fess up and move on.

A landmark decision paves the way for a high-cost/high-volume pricing model for healthcare.

“Employer frustration over the devastating collateral damage from a severely under-performing healthcare system is boiling over.”

The math says no. Attempts at making costs transparent only touch a tiny fraction of healthcare spending.

While it’s hard to dispute the benefits of insurance for everyone, we still must cut the cost of healthcare.

How do we move beyond the marketing campaigns to understand healthcare suppliers’ performance?

“Physicians overestimate the benefits of everything from interventions for back pain to cancer chemotherapy.”

When you hear boasts of big short-term impacts of wellness programs, beware. Someone is likely flogging the data.

No. 5: Miscoding can render analysis meaningless -- one company didn't know it was paying for 25 organ transplants a year.

A fundamental problem: 8% of employees represent 80% of healthcare costs -- and the 8% changes every 12 to 18 months.

Hospital mergers and acquisitions of physician practices keep driving up costs. It's high time we changed the equation.

Even if the cost per unit of service is standardized, extremely wide variation exists in how patients are treated for given conditions.

Studies have found that loneliness is as dangerous as diabetes, as being an alcoholic or as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

The big question is: Why are more self-insured employers not engaging directly with healthcare providers?

Healthcare providers have processes that are wildly inefficient -- but that can be fixed with a little input from self-insured employers.

Healthcare costs keep rising faster than general inflation because employers are afraid of even a few complaints by disrupted employees.

Walmart's Centers of Excellence Program is the best model we have for health coverage. It has been great for Walmart -- and for employees.

Carriers and healthcare providers have no incentives to curb fee-for-service payments. Self-insured employers must lead the way.

The millennia-old search for an elixir of life continues, with no prospect for success -- and at enormous cost to the healthcare system.

This list of the worst doctors covers millions of dollars in fraud, plus crazy stories like the anesthesiologist sexting in the O.R.

Wellness vendors ignore lots of costs when they calculate the return on investment of their programs. Here is what they leave out.

Prostate tests have finally started dropping because of evidence that the risks outweigh the benefits -- but there is a joker in the deck.

Wellness vendors contend better information can correct unhealthy lifestyles, but the roots of those lifestyles are far too complex.

Annual physicals, long taken on faith as valuable, can generate false positives that lead to unnecessary and dangerous treatment.

We've seen this movie before: Healthcare exchanges won't reduce costs for employees and will increase them for employers.

Consequences of job misery are weight gain, weakened immune system, loss of sleep, ruined relationships, increased aging and on and on.

One website explores topics ranging from morality and religion to post-surgery respiratory problems. Another always provides a hearty laugh.

Worksite wellness programs can make employees feel pestered: Who doesn't already know that smoking is unhealthy?

Cancer drugs have become extraordinarily expensive even though many provide little benefit. Shouldn't prices reflect benefits?

Via iDoctor, huge numbers of tests can be done more cheaply and faster and could be much less wasteful in terms of patients’ time.

Early studies on using mammograms to screen for breast cancer were deeply flawed, largely because they can lead to over-diagnosis.

A study by the NIH found that men who were heavy coffee drinkers were 10% less likely to die during the study; women, 15%.

Many companies evaluate wellness programs using employee surveys, but they are notoriously unreliable. There is a better way.

Or is it? Research is finding that people who are more optimistic live longer -- and your doctor can't help you with that.

If there are doctors and nurses committing hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicare fraud, then they are targeting self-insureds, too.

The job for doctors -- and for us as patients -- isn't just to heal but to figure out what makes us sick in the first place and stop it in its tracks.

More people are professing loneliness in their lives, and more evidence is piling up that loneliness, like dissatisfaction in life, is a killer.

The worst sin: continuing a program after the facts show it is a failure.

If you buy a donut somewhere, even as a treat for a grandchild, a company may be recording that information and selling it to your insurer.

HR and benefits managers need to wake up: One-third of knee replacements in the U.S. may be unnecessary.