Articles of Interest

By Ed Weisbart, M.D. | St. Louis Post-Dispatch
If you ever want to rekindle your hope for American medicine, spend time with medical students. These bright, energetic minds are going into medicine for all the right reasons — to help people, relieve suffering and find new ways to cure illness and eradicate disease.

By Bob Herman | Becker’s Hospital Review
One of the biggest buzz words in health care today is "reform" — and to quote REO Speedwagon, "It's everywhere." Perhaps the biggest poster child of the term "reform" is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that President Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010.

By Roger Brown | Bristol Herald Courier
BRISTOL, Va. -- The United States must move toward adopting a single-payer national health insurance program – or continue to risk seeing its future threatened by an inadequate system that wastes huge amounts of money and keeps millions of Americans from getting necessary medical care, two longtime physicians and health care advocates said Wednesday.

By Bernard Lown, M.D. | Dr. Bernard Lown’s Blog
Ever since starting clinical practice 62 years ago I have looked forward to this conference. Mercifully, good fortune and good genes enable me to attend. From my earliest days in medicine I have struggled against the prevailing model of health care. My opposition in part was provoked by the growing prevalence of overtreatment. Resort to excessive interventions seemed to be the illegitimate child of technology in the age of market medicine. If more than a half century ago overtreatment was at a trickle pace, it is now at flood tide.

By Aldebra Schroll, M.D. | KevinMD blog
The call came in the middle of a busy office day; the radiologist had found a suspicious area on the mammogram. I had received similar calls many times in my primary care practice. This time was different; the patient was me.

By David U. Himmelstein, M.D., and Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H. | The Nation
Bernard Avishai portrays progressive critics of Obama's health care bill as hopelessly naïve and out of touch with political reality. But intimate acquaintance with medical reality drove the criticism from us and our 18,000 colleagues in Physicians for a National Health Program who advocate single payer. As doctors, we're too cognizant that the plan will leave 23 million uninsured and thousands dying each year from lack of coverage; do nothing for our insured patients with coverage so skimpy that serious illness would lead to bankruptcy; strip tens of billions from safety net hospitals; and let medical costs continue to skyrocket, leaving Medicare and public workers' coverage open to savage cuts. Whatever its political merits, the bill is a failure in medical terms.

By Dr Kailash Chand | publicservice.co.uk
The NHS will now become 'just a logo' – a US style insurance scheme that is divorced from care delivery and dishes out public money to private companies, now that the government's NHS reforms have passed into law, writes one leading clinician

By Ann Settgast, M.D. | The Star Tribune (Minn.)
The need for our hospitals to provide uncompensated care to uninsured and underinsured Minnesotans will continue to grow if we do not fundamentally change our system. Assuming the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, more than 250,000 Minnesotans will remain uninsured, while hundreds of thousands more will rely on skimpy insurance that does not properly protect them from serious financial strain if they fall ill.

By JULIET LAPIDOS | The New York Times
Long before the sexting scandal that ended his career, Rep. Anthony Weiner advised the president on how to pass healthcare reform. Robert Draper reports in his new book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” that in September of 2009 Mr. Weiner told the president, “I think you’re looking at this entirely the wrong way. You need to simplify it. Just say that what we’re doing is gradually expanding Medicare.”