Category: Policy

The ideal health system lies between the two extremes

Admittedly, my views on funding health care have done a 180 since I left medical school. I grew up and went to university in the United Kingdom, which famously has one of the most heavily centralized socialized systems anywhere in the world. Born out o…

Why hospitals are getting into the housing business

One patient at Denver Health, the city’s largest safety-net hospital, occupied a bed for more than four years — a hospital record of 1,558 days. Another admitted for a hard-to-treat bacterial infection needed eight weeks of at-home IV antibiotics, but …

Why hospitals are getting into the housing business

One patient at Denver Health, the city’s largest safety-net hospital, occupied a bed for more than four years — a hospital record of 1,558 days. Another admitted for a hard-to-treat bacterial infection needed eight weeks of at-home IV antibiotics, but …

Uber and Lyft are playing larger roles for Medicaid

Arizona Medicaid Director Jami Snyder heard many complaints about enrollees missing medical appointments because the transportation provided by the state didn’t show or came too late. So this summer she hatched a solution familiar to millions of Americ…

If you build a budget, hospitals will adapt

U.S. health care spending is maddeningly high. As in fifty percent higher than what other wealthy countries spend, with no evidence we’re getting any bang for all those additional health care bucks. In 2014, the state of Maryland took direct aim at thi…

Medical schools need to produce more clinician-activists to help drive social change

For hundreds of years, health care providers have been on the front lines of social change. Think Margaret Sanger, a nurse who championed women’s rights and started the organization that later became Planned Parenthood, or Max Recamier, one of the phys…

Medical schools need to produce more clinician-activists to help drive social change

For hundreds of years, health care providers have been on the front lines of social change. Think Margaret Sanger, a nurse who championed women’s rights and started the organization that later became Planned Parenthood, or Max Recamier, one of the phys…

Don’t underestimate the appeal of a Trump “health plan”

As the Democratic candidates for president continue to beat up each other on how best to achieve universal coverage (Medicare for all, a public option, closing the ACA’s coverage gaps), health care journalists keep wondering when President Trump will r…

Black market pharmaceuticals target immigrants

The bootleg medications were smuggled across the border and sold to mostly Latino immigrants in public spaces throughout Los Angeles — at swap meets, parks, beauty salons and makeshift stands outside mom-and-pop grocery stores. The drugs were cheap, an…

An important health care safety net is at risk

EMTALA is born The machine beeps alarmingly as it breathes for your child. The various numbers on the monitor are foreign to you, but you know something isn’t right because the nurse briskly walks away from the stretcher to grab the doctor, who then or…