Category: Policy

The insanely brazen effort to remake medicine into a consumer industry

For over a decade, Washington, DC has been busy with fixing health care. For over a decade, the same government bureaucracy, the same advocacy (read lobbying) organizations, the same expert think tanks, the same academic centers, the same business asso…

How hospitals prepare for hurricanes

We all expect hospitals to be open and operating when we need them, but extreme weather events like hurricanes are a strain on resources and pose significant challenges for hospitals. Closing a hospital is an extreme action, but several hospitals in Fl…

Why can e-cigarettes advertise on TV?

Why does e-cigarette maker Juul advertise its product on TV when cigarette ads are banned? The short answer: Because it can. For nearly 50 years, cigarette advertising has been banned from TV and radio. But electronic cigarettes — those battery-operate…

A nurse’s powerful ER exit letter

Dear hospital, The last three years, I have had the pleasure of working in our state’s renowned emergency department and level-1 trauma center. My departure closes out a decade of my nursing career as an emergency room and flight nurse. This depa…

How nurse practitioners can expand abortion access

It has been a savage few months for reproductive rights, with 12 states passing 26 bills to ban abortion, including measures that ban abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, as well as attempting to outlaw safe methods of abortion. In the face o…

These medical students support Medicare for all. Here’s why.

The most difficult part of our first year of medical school wasn’t memorizing anatomy or mastering the patient interview, but seeing firsthand how broken our current health care system is. We pay twice as much as other wealthy nations for health care, …

Is medicine really a model family-friendly profession?

An article in the New York Times touting medicine as a family-friendly profession has stirred up critics who say it denies the reality of career sacrifice and gaps in leadership and pay that female physicians face. Writer Claire Cain Miller profiled fe…

It’s time to seriously study gun violence

I have been working on gun violence prevention for the past two years. After the Las Vegas shooting, I worked with a fellow medical student to create a course teaching medical students about gun violence and how it relates to medicine. We taught future…

Why the Lancet’s editorial on Kashmir is unhelpful

If Rudolph Virchow’s observation that “medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine writ large” is true, then medicine is bias writ large because politics is nothing but bias on steroids. Virchow’s maxim is now adopted by medical j…

The story of a hospital collapse and how small towns were devastated

The money was so good in the beginning, and it seemed it might gush forever, right through tiny country hospitals in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and into the coffers of companies controlled by Jorge A. Perez, his family, and business partners. It was…