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…
Category: Public Health & Policy
The impact of economic inequality on the incidence of mass shootings
Gun violence has become a public health epidemic. Despite countless deaths in mass shootings over the last two decades, the Dickey Amendment—a provision inserted into the 1996 spending bill which blocked federal funding for research on gun violence—rem…
5 disruptive trends transforming health care
Spiraling costs, poor quality outcomes, and inequities in access to care are driving significant and long overdue changes to the way health care is administered and managed in the United States. And while the U.S. spends more on health care per person …
Legislators, please stay out of our exam rooms. Especially when it comes to children and gender.
Legislators have found a new way to insert themselves into the physician-patient relationship. In October and November 2019, news stories regarding a parental dispute over the treatment of a transgender child prompted legislators in Texas, Kentucky, an…
Medical error is not the third leading cause of death
Ever since the publication of the infamous 2016 BMJ opinion piece claiming medical error should be considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S., the debate on the true incidence of deaths caused by medical error has been raging. Many, includ…
Prior authorization is another barrier to cost-effective care
The Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare,” has improved patient’s access to health care since its passing in 2010. The increase in coverage, however, does not address the restriction of prior authorization (PA), where a physician is required by a patien…
Health care is like lions for lambs
I just watched the movie 1917 at the theatre. Shot in a unique way giving an immersive experience, showing the frontline reality of war through an unforgettable human story, it has to be one of the greatest war movies ever made. I’d encourage everyone …
Margaret Mead was right about health care
One of my graduate school professors proclaimed that what is wrong with our society is that most people have not reached formal operations or have not been in psychotherapy. Formal operations is the stage of development, described by French researcher …
How health care is like a convoluted financial investment scheme
The business of medicine is unlike any other type of standard “business” in that health insurance and hospitals confound what would appear to be a simple exchange of services for a set price. You know that the confusion is bad when neither doctors nor…
Improve mental health by improving how we finance health care
It takes an average of 10 years between symptom onset for mental health conditions to be accurately diagnosed and therefore treated. In addition to general misunderstandings about mental health, the nationwide shortage of mental health providers is one…
