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Health Insurance For Me But Not for Thee? - How Legislators Tried to Rig the Repeal of the ACA to Keep Their Own Health Insurance Affordable

The turmoil swirling around the new Trump administration has flushed into the open some things that the public heretofore was probably not meant to see.... We have been writing a lot lately about how the insiders who run large health care organizations, and benefit mightily therefrom, try very hard to control the health care policy discourse, and keep us distracted from their wizardry behind the
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Pontifications About Health Care Reform Written by Insiders Who Benefit from the Status Quo - Worse Than We Think

Perceptions that the US health care system is dysfunctional and needs major reform go way back.  A timeline from the Tampa Bay Times noted President Theodore Roosevelt's proposal for a national health service in 1912.  Nonetheless, as we have discussed endlessly, most attempts at reform failed, and health care dysfunction seems to be getting worse. One big problem may be that we don't understand
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Medication errors in hospitals don’t disappear with new technology". Government: "It's the doctors' fault." I am cited.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article on EHR problems yesterday entitled "Medication errors in hospitals don’t disappear with new technology."  It is based on a recent study by the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, retrievable here:  http://patientsafetyauthority.org/ADVISORIES/AdvisoryLibrary/2017/Mar;14(1)/Pages/01.aspx I am cited.  Also cited is an HHS official, Dr. Andrew
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"A Radical Idea for Health-Care Reform: Listen to the Doctors" - Oops, I Mean Listen to the Corporate Executives, Directors, and Lobbyists

It has been the season for health care reform in the US since at least the Nixon administration.  We have endlessly discussed the unholy triad of health care dysfunction: rising costs, declining access, and stagnant quality. These days, with all the furor over whether Obamacare should be repealed and replaced, let alone, or improved, it is still the season for health care reform.  Last week an
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Part of the Solution, or Part of the Problem? - Health Care Corporate CEOs on Physician Burnout

Physician burnout is in the news again.  Late in 2015, an article by Shaneyfelt and colleagues in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings showed an increase in the proportion of physicians reporting at least one symptom of burnout to 54.4% in 2014(1), up from the 45.5% they reported in 2012(2).  A March 28, 2017, post in the Health Affairs blog based on the latest article warning about burnout and suggesting
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An eloquently expressed lesson from Nanaimo (Canada) on electronic medical records failure

Unfortunately, this eloquent piece on EHR failure expresses precisely the major problems with this experimental technology that generic medical managers and other medical bureaucrats are unwilling to hear, and/or unable to fully comprehend. At my May 31, 2016 post "HIT Mayhem, Canadian Style: Nanaimo (Vancouver Island) doctors say electronic health record system unsafe, should be shut down,
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Who Benefits? - From the Mayo Clinic Explicitly Putting Commercially Insured Patients Ahead of Some Government Insured Patients?

Amidst all the chaotic noise emanating from Washington, DC, little snippets of news keep slipping out reminding us that the US health care system remains monumentally dysfunctional, and that the dysfunction serves the interests of the system's insiders. Putting Commercially Insured Patients First On March 15, 2017, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune first reported that the CEO of the august Mayo
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