The World Health Organization has designated 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and Midwife in honor of Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday. We owe a lot to Florence Nightingale, but what about Harriet Tubman or Mary Seacole? Nursing – and society – has b…
The practice of medicine is limited by what we can control. As students, we are taught to believe in the power of science, the importance of hard work, and the momentum of technological advancement as prime determinants in our patients’ outcomes. Howev…
The practice of medicine is limited by what we can control. As students, we are taught to believe in the power of science, the importance of hard work, and the momentum of technological advancement as prime determinants in our patients’ outcomes. Howev…
There are certain paradoxes of life that are beyond the realm of rational explanation. To me, one of such is that a country that figured out how to defy gravity and conquered the cosmos has time and time again proven to be incapable of taking care of t…
Would a Hippocratic Oath for health care executives make a difference? Probably not. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that the organizational cultures of too many hospitals are not conducive to physician well-being. In a provocative blog posted on …
The standard business model around which our world revolves has no place in the “business” of human life, which is what the commercialized industry of health care has become. To be the most successful, businesses work to optimize profits by minimizing …
At kitchen tables everywhere, ordinary Americans have been grappling with the arcane language of deductibles and co-pays as they’ve struggled to select a health insurance plan during open enrollment season. Unfortunately, critical information that coul…
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…
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, …
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…
