Remember to grab that Valentine's Day card?
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How does access to primary care impact healthcare costs?
Nipping medical problems and medical bills in the bud. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. First, the Trump administration is planning on paring back some tariffs on steel and aluminum goods. This is according to multiple media reports, partly because officials are recognizing something the administration has repeatedly denied, that tariffs raise prices for consumers. The tariffs were also very complicated for businesses to calculate. One way to avoid major medical bills is to catch major medical problems early or prevent them. That is why we have annual checkups and vaccines and antibiotics. But if you don't have good access to a doctor, all of that becomes harder. Researchers calculated just how big a difference that access makes.
Marketplace's Kaylee Wells has more.
If you're an adult with a chronic disease, having a go-to primary care doctor cuts your health care costs in half. The report from the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Primary Care says it also lowers your chance of getting hospitalized by 20 percent. And then for children with chronic disease, the benefits were even more striking. Dr. Morgan McDonald is the National Director for Population Health at Milbank Memorial Fund, which co-funded the report. She said one in three adults in the U.S. can't get primary care. Lack of insurance can be a significant barrier. Cost can be a barrier. And the other barrier? Only 5% of U.S. health care spending goes toward primary care.
So... We have moved more and more physicians into specialty care. So we only see them when we have something specifically wrong.
Health care finance professor emeritus J.B. Silvers at Case Western Reserve University says med school pushes students toward picking specialties, rheumatology, dermatology, oncology, that kind of thing.
You make a lot more money as a specialist than you do as a primary care doctor.
That's why the report says the answer is increasing spending on the primary care workforce. More money means more primary care doctors, which means more health problems solved before they get really expensive. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.
Having a doctor is one thing. Being able to get an appointment quickly is another. Later today on Marketplace in the evening, we'll have a report on fast medical care as a subscription. You can catch that on your public radio station or on podcast.
If you are in the greeting card business, Valentine's Day is more than just a holiday. It's an opportunity to drive sales, and a huge one. 6.5 billion greeting cards are bought in the U.S. each year, according to the Greeting Card Association. For our series, What's That Like?, we spend time with people doing jobs you don't hear about every day. And today, we connect with Michelle Byrne, who pivoted from graphic design to become a full-time greeting card maker during the pandemic.
I have 50,000 cards sitting around me, so it's really great whenever people come over and they're like, oh, I forgot to get a card for my mom. Can I just grab one? I'm Michelle Byrne, and I'm the founder of Paper and Stuff. So my mom is a fine artist, and she's always encouraged us to draw and create as kids, myself and my sister's. And she just loves a greeting card and she loves a handwritten, a hand-drawn one more than anything. It's just like a very normal thing in our family to do that for each other. So I kind of started off hand-making them for friends and family. And then I kind of put my design background to work and started doing it, I guess, a little bit more officially. I was Googling craft fairs around New York and came across the National Stationery Show, naively thinking it was a small craft market.
After I had signed up and they let me know that I got in and started asking me for some official business details that I did not have yet, I decided to just go for it and figure it out as I went. Yeah, it was kind of like it went from hobby to full-time wholesale real quick. My brand and my cards are a reflection of me in that they are silly, yet they're sincere and caring.
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