I am on a “writing sabbatical” this summer with limited access to the internet. I will resume posting articles in August. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer!
Will a fiercely independent person like me become less generous if I practice mindfulness? Will all that focus on self and present drawing me away from other people’s concerns?
The Duke Alumni Magazine just published a Q & A about my new book, Sick to Debt. Here was the picture accompanying that article. Y’all agree that this should have been the “author photo” on the back cover? Link to the Q & A
It used to be that hospitals billed Medicare for the services they provided, and Medicare – I know this is crazy! – simply paid the bills. Those days are rapidly receding into history. Soon, a significant chunk of hospital revenue will be at risk, under a series of Medicare pay-for-performance programs. The idea behind P4P…
We think of political parties as being ideological homes. If you embrace conservative ideas, you gravitate to the Republican party, and so on. But probably just as often, people have party homes (“My dad was a Dem, and so am I”), in which whatever the party embraces magically fits their ideology. Consider the following picture…
Shutterstock As a primary care physician, I have counseled thousands of patients to get cancer screening—blood tests to look for prostate cancer, mammograms to detect impalpable breast cancers, and colonoscopies to find precancerous colon lesions. I’ve even tried to find cancers on physical exam, palpating people’s necks for thyroid growths, for example. The goal of…
Most conservatives agree that Medicaid costs are too high. Most liberals agree that Medicaid patients should receive necessary medical care for free. And both conservatives and liberals agree that we should embrace ways to encourage Medicaid patients to obtain important preventive care services, in hopes that such services will lower healthcare costs by promoting public…