As America struggles to extend health-care coverage while curbing health-care costs, we face a decision that is more important than whether we have a public-insurance option, more important than whether we will have a single-payer system in the long run or a mixture of public and private insurance, as we do now. Atul Gawande
As Gawande [...]
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In recent years, doctor-bashing has become a popular hobby. Physicians seem to blamed for everything. A friend and retired pathologist, Dr. Richard Reece, recently described this phenomenon on his blog as follows (excerpt):
For a number of years, physicians, as the most visible symbol of health care delivery, have been criticized, chastised, and blamed for everything [...]
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There are no one step solutions for managing complex change such as healthcare reform at the national level. Many factors have to come together in perfect harmony.
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Consumers shopping for health insurance today face more choice, complexity, and financial exposure than ever before. In an increasingly uncertain world, what they are really seeking is peace of mind in their choices. Insurers that address the emotional needs and biases embedded in the typical consumer’s behavior will be successful in creating and distributing effective [...]
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For Margalit Gur-Arie, writing for the Health Care blog, the future of primary care is a barren landscape:
I fear that the independent family doctor is going to go the way the corner bookstore went, and be replaced by the cold, impersonal, shiny mega-clinic chain in the city. It won’t be long after that before Wal-Mart [...]
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Despite the state’s move towards universal health insurance, visits to Massachusetts emergency rooms went up 7% between 2005 and 2007. This is consistent with a 2008 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine showing that the primarily driver behind an increase in emergency room utilization from 1996 to 2004 was lack of access to convenient [...]
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The arrival of digital medicine promises to shake the medical establishment to its roots, not least because it will hand so much more information over to patients themselves. But the biggest savings will not come through exotic pills or “patient empowerment”, but from the application of basic economics. Realign the incentives in health care so [...]
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In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Eric G. Campbell, Ph.D., writes about “The Future of Research Funding in Academic Medicine.”
The premise:
Medical schools and teaching hospitals in the United States are essential producers of basic scientific and clinical knowledge that drives our supply of new medicines, devices, and other health care [...]
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Ultimately, says Khozin, the goal is for Hello Health to go nationwide, and hopefully impact proposals for reform. “The heath-care system cannot be fixed the way it is,” Khozin says. “Top-down mandates won’t work. The best kind of reform is grass-roots.”
The above segment is an excerpt from a recent New York Post article where I [...]
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Another good article coauthored by Jerome Groopman, New Yorker staff writer and Harvard physician, on the dangers of promoting protocol-based medicine:
…rigid and punitive rules to broadly standardize care for all patients often break down. Human beings are not uniform in their biology. A disease with many effects on multiple organs, like diabetes, acts differently in [...]
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