Category: Policy

Beyond volunteering to help with COVID-19 relief, medical students must also advocate for a change to our health care system

As if it were a typical Monday afternoon, my anatomy instructor asked my medical school classmates to lean in a little closer. “Do you see the left gastric artery?” He asked, as he zoomed in on a 3D online visualization of a stomach. Instead of leaning…

Preparing for the next pandemic: Why a one-country approach is needed

One needs to look no further than any mainstream news or social media outlet to realize that our public health system and hospitals are overwhelmed. Whether it be the lack of adequate testing reagents to properly monitor the current COVID-19 pandemic o…

Coronavirus highlights why America needs a national medical license

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many vulnerabilities in the U.S. health care system. While shortages of safety equipment and ventilators have been widely reported, the shortage of physicians and staff to manage patients in respiratory failure is also…

Reclaiming the future of health care

A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD. Although I work for the American College of Physicians, I’m writing this as a general internist who has practiced both primary care and hospital-based medicine for over 25 year…

Why doctors should get political

I became a physician to help people. So isn’t fighting for issues that help protect my patients such as racial equality, LGBTQ rights, gender pay equity, access to health care, and education all part of patient care? Don’t my patients want …

Gun violence requires medical intervention

109. This is the number of people who died each day from firearms in the U.S. in 2017, the most recent year for which the CDC has published data. It is a staggering number, one that deeply damages the fabric of communities and tears families apart. Wha…

What’s the future of the physician assistant?

Currently, in America, there are only three legal groups of prescribers, the physicians (which include MDs, DOs, DPMs), the nurse practitioner (NPs), and the physician assistant (PAs). The first class of physician assistants, in 1965, was also the year…

When physician leaders get acquired and squeezed

As a child, when I first read The Little Prince and saw the picture of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, I would often ponder what it felt like to be the elephant. Later in seventh-grade science class, when I learned of amoebae and how they s…

Supporters of Obamacare should consider this Trump proposal

Readers of my articles know that no one has been more critical of Obamacare’s flaws––particularly over the impact the program has had on middle-class consumers in the individual health insurance market. And, readers already know that no one has b…

Urgent care is emblematic of problems in our health system

 Working in urgent care, I’ve started supervising some of the other providers at sites other than my own — 19 sites in all in Pennsylvania and Delaware — so I hear about a lot of patient situations. The urgent care site where I work i…