Commentary
March 13, 2011
Health Care Agent and Proxy
We all need a health care agent to speak for us if we are incapacitated while critical decisions must be made about our care, for example, in an ICU. Your doctor discusses some of the many issues surrounding health care agents and provides a standard health care proxy form used to appoint the agent.
March 9, 2011
You Never Want to Be an Interesting Case. Be Medically Boring.
Dr. Kanner loves medical boredom because then the patient is almost always healthy. Interesting cases are intellectually fascinating but may have bad outcomes. Which would you prefer?
February 26, 2010
Health Care 3: The Terror of Being Uninsured
If you are uninsured and need serious medical care, your costs are almost unimaginably higher than you pay as an insured person. Some illustrations to underscore why we must change the insurance rules to get everyone into the system.
September 28, 2009
Health Care 2: Health Insurance Essentials
We need first to tackle the basic issues of health insurance. Preexisting conditions and other inequities. Do individuals get treated like groups? Are groups all treated the same? What is the range of insurance costs attributed to people of different ages? Ultimately, we must get everyone an affordable ticket to the health care arena. That's…
September 5, 2009
The Health Care Reform Conundrum – 1
Why our health care system is so wonderful and so dysfunctional is an immensely complex tale that is of immediate political importance to understand. Introduction to a planned series of reports.
April 27, 2009
NY Times: Severe Primary Care Physician Shortage
The New York Times lead story today was on the nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, which imperils the ability of the Obama administration to successfully implement health care reform.
March 2, 2009
Vitamins Do Not Reduce Death, Cancer or Heart Disease
Multivitamin use does not reduce the overall death rate nor the risk of cardiovascular disease nor most common cancers, according to recent results from the Women's Health Initiative, which studies over 160,000 postmenopausal women.