In a previous post, I argued in favor of Rob Califf as FDA Commissioner. Here is an article from the Duke Chronicle, exploring more of this important debate. Dr. Robert Califf, former vice chancellor of clinical and translational research, may soon be taking helm of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but not without resistance from organizations…
We spend more for medical care in the United States than just about anywhere in the world, but it’s not because people in this country get admitted to the hospital and stay for long periods of time. Instead, we have shorter length of stays in American hospitals than in the vast majority of developed countries…
According to a report from FamiliesUSA, an organization advocating for improved healthcare coverage, these are the medical services people forego when money gets tight:
She came to the urgent care center with a sprained ankle. The primary care provider gave her excellent care, expertly applying evidence-based evaluation guidelines to her situation, and, thereby, avoiding unnecessary x-rays. By all measures, the provider’s care was excellent, but the interaction still ended up reducing his salary. You see, that patient’s only medical…
Want to know why we spent so much on healthcare in United States? There are lots of reasons. Our population is aging, the rate of diabetes is rising, and the healthcare industry keeps developing wonderful but expensive new technologies to treat our ailments. But more than anything, we have a price problem. It’s price increases…
Here is a game you can’t lose. You flip a fair coin ten times and every time it comes up heads, you get $20. Better yet, I won’t even watch you flip the coin, but instead will trust whatever you tell me about the number of times the coin comes up heads versus tails. Would…
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics. You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
Russell Wilson took a hard hit to the head in the NFC Championship game last year against the Green Bay Packers. His team, the Seattle Seahawks, won the game, but would Wilson, the team’s star quarterback, recover in time for the next game? That game, by the way, goes by the name The Super Bowl….
A while back, I wrote a piece in the Hastings Center Report proposing a better way of teaching ethics to professionals, like medical students. I thought such education should be grounded less in philosophy and more in understanding the psychology of our moral behavior. Glad to see that my ideas have been picked up, in…
This picture, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows that many people who lack health insurance in the United States right now are actually eligible for either Medicaid or federally subsidized private insurance.