A recent article was published in the Atlantic about Americans being the worst patients. Americans are part of a broken and dysfunctional health care system with exorbitant costs, a maelstrom of bureaucratic red tape, and insurance coverage that barely…
Category: Public Health & Policy
What would an optimal libertarian health care system look like?
Next in a series. In prior posts, I described my Healthcare Incentives Framework. If you haven’t read those, I recommend you check them out first to have the full context for this post. But here’s a refresher of the main points of the framework without…
“How are you doing?” A simple question with a big impact.
From October 25 to October 29, 2019, more than 10,000 pediatricians from all over the world gathered in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, to attend the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition. As the world’s larg…
Where have all the doctors gone?
As my husband passed the milestone birthday of 40, he thought it would be a good idea to get a physical exam as it had been several years since he saw a physician. Easy task, right? We soon came to find that the landscape of health care had been changi…
The health effects of structural racism
In the United States, the health of African-Americans lags behind most other racial minority groups. Compared to whites, black men and women face higher risks of chronic illness, infection, and injuries. Taken altogether, the average life span for Af…
The cure to our malignant health system
An excerpt from Curing the Cancer in U. S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine. Clinical doctors can readily understand the continuing failure of the U.S. health care system. The attending physicians for Patient Healthcare–Washington, both…
Why physicians should start thinking about climate change
Climate change. Global warming. The greenhouse effect. Devastating wildfires, dangerous air quality. Catastrophic weather events and mass human migration. It all sounds like post-apocalyptic fiction except that it’s real. Inside our air-condition…
How we can help our veterans die in peace
The World War II veteran, now in his 90s and receiving hospice for end-of-life care, was playing military anthems on his harmonica for fellow veterans. But the next minute, reliving the horrors of combat, he grew agitated and started to cry. “Oh, all …
The barriers to patients choosing higher-value providers and insurers
Next in a series. I have developed a framework, which I call the Healthcare Incentives Framework, that helps me understand health care systems. It outlines the jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and identifies which parties in the health …
A solution to reduce defensive medicine
An excerpt from Technology and the Doctor-Patient Relationship. As disturbing as the structure of malpractice insurance is in America, a more significant problem is the defensive style of medical practice it induces. In a large-scale survey done by Jac…
