I confess that I haven’t paid that much attention to the horse race politics of insurance enrollment under the PPACA (Obamacare). Overall, even if 7.1 million signed up, pay their premiums, and weren’t previously insured, it still means that only a small fraction of the 50 million uninsured now have coverage....
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I am on the teaching staff at the John Peter Smith Hospital Family Medicine Residency in Fort Worth. The editor of the Primary Care Progress blog asked me and some other faculty and residents across the country to write about the match process. The “match” is the system where we rank...
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A recent article in JAMA showed the disappointing results of a 3-year study of over 100 certified patient-centered medical homes in southeast Pennsylvania. Basically, it showed only 1 of 11 quality measures improved and utilization and costs were not reduced. In one of the most narrow-minded statements by the AAFP ever,...
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I had the great privilege and excitement of seeing Britain’s National Health Service up close and personal this past fall. My primary guide was Dr. Helen Stokes-Lampard, who is the honorary Treasurer of the Royal College of General Practitioners. She is very unlike her stuffy title. She is very down to...
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I know some of you have seen this already, but I thought I’d broadcast this piece one more time. This is a link to a post I wrote for Primary Care Progress. In it, I talk about examples of how family physicians are still faithfully serving the needs of nearly 70...
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I assume many of you have heard by now of the Canadian randomized controlled mammography study that found that 25 years later, there was no difference in breast cancer death rates between 40-59 year-old women who had mammograms vs. those who did not. I won’t go into a lot of further...
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This article received some notice when it was first published in August. Haley Edwards writing for Washington Monthly does a great job exposing the insider deals and duplicity of the AMA’s Relative Value Update Committee, or RUC (commonly pronounced “ruck”). This is the AMA’s committee that advices Congress on updates to...
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In a wonderfully strongly-worded piece in the New York Times, Drs. Rita Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman talk about the future physical harms of excessive CT scans now. They state that 1 in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan each year. A study by the National Cancer Institute estimated that CT scans...
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I assume many readers of American HealthScare have already read this piece from the New York Times. But just in case you haven’t, if you have any anti-nausea medicine at home, take it 30 minutes before reading this. I continue to be flabbergasted that the private sector allows this to happen....
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Many parts of the U.S. are in the throes of the flu season. And as usual, plenty of misinformation is circulating and passed from one person to another, just like the flu virus. The good news is that unlike more egregious examples of waste and greed in the U.S. healthcare system,...
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