The Republicans don’t yet have a health care plan less than a year before the 2020 elections. But based upon their 2017 Obamacare repeal and replace efforts, as well as a major document recently issued by the House Republican Study Committee, wha…
Category: Policy
How special interests won big and consumers lost big
As the year winds down and must-pass year-end spending bills are completed — and with that, any chance of attaching and approving health care legislation — the special interests have won big, and consumers have lost big. Employers, unions, …
Our optimal future U.S. health care system
Next in a series. The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care syste…
5 improvements needed to modernize the American hospital landscape
Over the past 40 years, the number of U.S. hospitals declined by 12 percent, from more than 7,100 in 1975 to 6,200 in 2017, according to the latest American Hospital Association survey. And, yet, despite shuttering nearly 1,000 facilities, hospitals re…
Medicare for all is dead because Democratic voters aren’t buying it
Fixing Obamacare and adding a public option is the health care policy territory first staked out by Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Writing about Biden’s plan recently on my blog, I said: If the Democrats capture the White House, kee…
We need physicians who advocate for patients’ best interests
As presidential hopefuls debate health care reform, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish statements rooted in fact from fiction. According to PolitiFact, only 27% of politicians’ media statements regarding health care — whether from Dem…
What if people were only allowed to use food assistance dollars to buy healthy food?
One of my elderly relatives was in line at the grocery store one day and saw the person ahead of him, charging what looked like a cart full of junk food to her food assistance card. My relative was incensed: Why, should his hard-earned tax dollars be u…
Compromise vs. greed in ending surprise medical bills
There are few things in our health care system that are more unfair than surprise medical bills. Consumers think they have good coverage and are getting treatment in their health plan network only to get a huge unexpected bill in the mail because it tu…
Medicare for all advocates are in for a rude awakening
Migrating to the U.S. as an international medical graduate, I was shocked by the health care culture of excess. Initially, it felt good to order a CT scan on everyone who had a fall or cardiac enzymes on anybody who had atypical chest pain. I felt powe…
Is there a link between readmission and a hospital’s non-profit status?
It was the middle of winter in downtown Chicago in 1995, and I was sitting across from an apologetic alcoholic holding a slimy NG tube. Mr. Smith, an emaciated man in his sixties, had been on my service for three days with acute pancreatitis, and this …
