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Your Health Insurance Plan: “You Can Keep It If You Want”

Forgive me for being a little late to the healthcare insurance reform discussion. I was busy, y’know, providing actual healthcare to sick people while that whole rigamarole was going on. But that one sentence, uttered over and over by everyone from the President on down, always stuck in my craw. At long last, I’m finally able to properly articulate my response.

Trying to pass sweeping health insurance reform legislation while telling people that, of course, they “can keep their current plans if they want” is like legislating tough new laws against wifebeating and assuring women that, of course, they can stay with their husbands if they like.

No one tries to force victims of domestic violence to leave their abusers, but they do try to help them understand that they have options, and that they don’t deserve to be treated so poorly. I firmly believe that people who like their current insurance plans probably have several things in common. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Dinosaur*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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