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.
To find out the answer to this question–ok, a partial answer–listen to my appearance on the NPR show The Takeaway. CLICK HERE.
For decades now, policymakers have been trying to slow down the growth of healthcare costs. For much of this time, a large part of that effort was directed at hospital spending. American hospitals are extremely expensive, and take care of patients with the most severe illnesses. So if we’re going to control costs, it seems…
Most men diagnosed with prostate cancer don’t die of the disease. Between 2011 and 2015, 112.6 per 100,000 men per year were diagnosed with prostate cancer in the U.S., but only 19.5 per 100,000 men per year died of the disease over that same period of time. That is still far too many deaths. But the…
It was the late 90s and HIV was spreading through South African teenagers like, well, like a sexually transmitted disease. Sleep with a South African at that time and you faced a one in six chance of having a close encounter with the virus. Frightening odds. But not frightening enough to curb teenage sexual activities….
300 million dead worldwide from smallpox in the 20th century alone. No wonder the United States Public HealthService is run by a General—fighting infectious disease was a life or death battle back then, and countries that failed to mobilize against the enemy would leave millions dead on the battlefield. In Germany, as I discussed in a recent…
Ten years ago, my tennis partner suffered a stroke. He was a sixty-year-old at the time, working to move up into the top ten players in his age group. In the country! You could not have found a healthier sixty-year-old. He played tennis three-plus hours a day, scampering across the court like a hyperactive adolescent. …
I was recently interviewed on NPR’s marketplace by Dan Gorenstein. He did a really nice story on the kind of bravery it takes for health care opinion leaders to put their ideas to the test of a randomized trial, when the world is already ready to pay them huge amounts of money to promote their…