Brief Essays

  • How Self-Dealing Is Bankrupting Hospitals And Nursing Homes

    There are lots of reasons many community hospitals and nursing homes are at risk of bankruptcy. One reason: Sometimes the very entities owning hospitals and nursing homes are purposely bankrupting them, pillaging them of their value to maximize the owners’ profits. It is a type of self-dealing known as “related-party earnings,” and here is how…

  • Before Getting An Operation, Ask Your Surgeon This Question

    There are a lot of factors that influence surgical success. It starts with the health of the patient – the sicker you are, the greater risk you have of experiencing postoperative problems. In addition, it’s critical to figure out whether surgery is “indicated,” as clinical folks would say it. But once you have decided surgery…

  • Private Equity-Owned Retinal Practices Perform Fewer Retinal Detachment Procedures

    In recent years, many private equity firms have bought up physician practices, and then looked for ways to increase profits. Sometimes they achieve profits by bringing administrative efficiencies to bear upon their practices. Other times, after buying enough practices to gain local market share, they increase prices, with insurers having little choice but to pay…

  • Another Way Coffee Won’t Kill You

    Coffee has been falsely accused of causing a host of health problems. However, one potential risk of coffee has more plausibly concerned experts for quite a while. It is the belief that coffee can cause your heart to race too fast, through abnormal rhythms such as atrial fibrillation. According to recent research, it looks like…

  • Medicare Can Save $4 Billion On Four Cancer Drugs — Can You Guess Which Ones?

    Medicare could save more than $4 billion by negotiating prices on just four drugs. Want to guess what those drugs are? Or what diseases they treat? Are they drugs for common diseases, with lots of people yielding lots of savings? Or for rare cancers, where the drugs are so expensive there is still lots of…

  • Upset About The High Price Of Your Hospital Stay? Medicaid Cuts Might Be To Blame

    Under the Big Beautiful Bill, the federal government is making steep cuts to Medicaid funding. Those cuts could increase the price you pay for medical care. Here’s why when the government cuts Medicaid funding, we all pay the price. Read more here

  • Are Nursing Homes Lying About Their Patients To Increase Profits? You Decide

    Imagine you are CEO of a chain of nursing homes. You know that the sicker your patients are, the more money you will get from Medicare. You also know that Medicare determines how sick patients are by counting how many diagnoses they have and assessing the severity of those diagnoses. Given these facts, what would…

  • Thinking About IV Hydration At A Nearby Medical Spa? Think Again

    On a hot summer day in Texas two years ago, Jenifer Cleveland visited a medical spa to receive IV hydration. Her primary care physician had not diagnosed her with dehydration, and probably wasn’t even aware she was about to receive the “treatment.” Entering one of the therapy suites, she laid down while a mixture of…

  • Hopping Mad Over Drug Company Product Hopping

    The state of California is suing Gilead Sciences over its delay of an HIV drug, a move that critics of the pharmaceutical industry call “product hopping.” Regardless of how the lawsuit comes out, the company’s actions strike me as deeply immoral and ought to leave all of us hopping mad. Here’s what we know.

  • Try To Guess Which Chemotherapy Saves The Most Lives

    You have metastatic cancer and must decide upon a chemotherapy. Here are your options, drawn from real clinical trial data. Chemo 1: Will increase your life expectancy from 12 to 15 months. Chemo 2: Increases your chance of being alive at one year by 12%. In other words, one out of every eight patients receiving…

Here are some things, other than books and blog posts, that I wrote with a general audience in mind:

And here are some non-technical “academic” articles:

If you’re interested in a complete list of my academic research, access a PDF of my CV here.