Baldies' Blog began originally in the UK by a 26 year old journalist with a blood cancer on a mission to inform the world about bone marrow donation.

He has since died, and I took on the cause of making cancer care more transparent for everybody.

Cancer is a disease that will touch everybody through diagnosis or affiliation: 1 in 2 men will be diagnosed and 1 in 3 woman will hear those words, "You Have Cancer."

I invite you to read how I feel along my journey and
how I am continuing to live a full life alongside my Hodgkin's lymphoma, with me controlling my cancer, not my cancer controlling me.

I hope that "Baldies' Blog" will prepare you to handle whatever life sends you, but especially if it's the message, "You Have Cancer."

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Information is Power


Please take a second to read Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/

He is pioneering transparency in health care.

Opacity within the health care system is the primary barrier to care. Transparency is the cure.

Remember, information asymmetry causes fear.

In the late 1990s, the price of term life insurance dropped dramatically. The prices of other insurances, health , automobile, and homeowners coverage for example, remained the same
What was the change?

That change was the internet, specifically the creation of sites like quotesmith.com that allowed customers to compare, within seconds, the cost, quality and terms of life insurance.
Suddenly finding the cheapest policy that met your needs, which was previously difficult and time consuming if not impossible, was made simple. This forced more expensive companies to drop their rates.
Suddenly, customers were paying $1 billion less a year for term life insurance (Duber & Leavitt,Freakonomics, 2005, HarperCollins, p.66).

Information is power.

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