Surprise medical bills — those unexpected and often pricey bills patients face when they get care from a doctor or hospital that isn't in their insurance network — are the health care problem du jour in Washington, with President Trump and congressional lawmakers from both sides of the aisle calling for action.
These policymakers agree on the need to take patients out of the middle of the fight over charges, but crafting a legislative solution will not be easy.
Whether it’s in trying to land a job or impress a date, people spend a staggering amount of time making claims about themselves. It makes sense: You’re the only person on Earth who has direct knowledge of every thought, feeling, and experience you’ve ever had. Who could possibly know you better than you? But your backstage access to your own mind sometimes makes you the last person on Earth others should trust about it. Think of it like owning a car: Just because you’ve driven it for years doesn’t mean you can pinpoint when and why the engine broke down.
Sixteen rigorous studies of thousands of people at work have shown that people’s coworkers are better than they are at recognizing how their personality will affect their job performance. As a social scientist, if I want to get a read on your personality, I could ask you to fill out a survey on how stable, dependable, friendly, outgoing, and curious you are. But I would be much better off asking your coworkers to rate you on those same traits: They’re often more than twice as accurate. They can see things that you can’t or won’t—and these studies reveal that whatever you know about yourself that your coworkers don’t is basically irrelevant to your job performance.
Whether it’s in trying to land a job or impress a date, people spend a staggering amount of time making claims about themselves. It makes sense: You’re the only person on Earth who has direct knowledge of every thought, feeling, and experience you’ve ever had. Who could possibly know you better than you? But your backstage access to your own mind sometimes makes you the last person on Earth others should trust about it. Think of it like owning a car: Just because you’ve driven it for years doesn’t mean you can pinpoint when and why the engine broke down.
Sixteen rigorous studies of thousands of people at work have shown that people’s coworkers are better than they are at recognizing how their personality will affect their job performance. As a social scientist, if I want to get a read on your personality, I could ask you to fill out a survey on how stable, dependable, friendly, outgoing, and curious you are. But I would be much better off asking your coworkers to rate you on those same traits: They’re often more than twice as accurate. They can see things that you can’t or won’t—and these studies reveal that whatever you know about yourself that your coworkers don’t is basically irrelevant to your job performance.
The generic drug boom began in the mid-1980s, when pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer dominated the market. In response to rising costs and complaints over the influence of "big Pharma," Congress unanimously passed the Hatch-Waxman Act in 1984, which created a new regulatory track for generic drugs. As long as generic manufacturers could prove their drugs were bioequivalent to brand-name drugs, meaning they acted similarly in the body, they could get approved. It was a boon for generic drugmakers, and in principle for the American public, allowing market competition to yield less expensive but equivalent drugs. Bottle of Lies Bottle of Lies The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban Hardcover, 482 pages purchase But according to Eban, parts of the law incentivized speed over quality. Its "first-to-file" rule granted whichever company filed its FDA application first exclusive rights to sell its version of the generic drug for six months, at near brand-level prices, before competitors could enter the market. According to Eban's reporting, this created a Wild West environment, where being first mattered more than getting it right.
But here's the surprise: Despite the assumption that most gossip is trash talk, the study finds that the vast majority of gossip is nonjudgmental chitchat. "We actually found that the overwhelming majority of gossip was neutral," says study author Megan Robbins, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, who studies how people's social interactions are related to their health and well-being. "About three-quarters of the conversation we heard in our sampled conversations was neither positive nor negative," Robbins says.