Is the VA the Key to Healthcare Reform?
To find out the answer to this question–ok, a partial answer–listen to my appearance on the NPR show The Takeaway. CLICK HERE.
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Succulent Sandwiches and Consumable Calories: Who's Counting?
Last summer, New York City made a great stride toward promoting public health, by requiring chain restaurants to prominently publish calorie counts alongside their menus. This type of regulation holds the promise of improving people’s eating habits, without restricting their freedom to order whatever they want. Theoretically, this new regulation should help consumers make better…
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When Bad Advice Is the Best Advice
Eighteen years out of training, and I still find myself struggling to understand the moral imperatives of medical practice. Not long ago, as part of my hospital duties, I cared for a man who could no longer swallow. This dysphagia was his only medical complaint, one that had sneaked up on him over the course…
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Feeling Conflicted about Greed
With jobs disappearing faster than a major league fastball, the public is understandably irate at the damage that greed has wrought upon our economy. Financiers destroy their companies, and our retirement portfolios, and then complain when their bonuses are less than 7 figures. The greedy behavior in recent headlines has not been limited to Wall…
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Market rationality and hormonal logic
Studying economics in college at the dawn of the Reagan presidency, I learned about the wonders of free-markets. The invisible hand of the market, I read, guarantees that thousands upon thousands of people–each with unique desires, abilities and values–mesh together, thereby able to achieve the balance of work and leisure, and of material and spiritual…
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Risky Business: Health Risk, Relativity, and Perception
Patt Morrison of KPCC Radio in Southern California talks to me about how people make various rational and irrational decisions in their lives. CLICK HERE to listen.
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Jealous Jejunums and Descartes’ Legacy
A recent New York Times headline proclaimed that: “In Pain and Joy Of Envy, the Brain May Play a Role.” May play a role?! Where else does The New York Times think envy resides? In our hateful hearts? Our covetous colons? Our jealous jejunums? That The New York Times could doubt the centrality of the…
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Stimulating Physical Activity by Building Healthy Neighborhoods
Hiking in Switzerland several years ago, I came across a trail that seemed to dead-end at a farmer’s gate. I looked around for a way to avoid the property, but there was none. Instead, the trail continued through the middle of the farm. I walked through the gate, side-stepping some livestock in the way (and…
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Heroin and Happiness
Quick: What do you get when you mix a Nobel Prize winner with a MacArthur genius? You get this: “The claims of some heavy drinkers and smokers that they want to but cannot end their addictions seem to us no different from the claims of single persons that they want to but are unable to…
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Human Nature And The Financial Crisis
Quick quiz: If there are 1,000 people in a village, and 10% of them have contracted a new, awful disease called acute hotchocolitis, how many people in the village are sick? This is not a trick question; the answer is 100. An easy question for readers of Forbes. But ask the average American, and one…