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Why Physicians Should Weigh In On Healthcare Reform

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It’s interesting to see how different things are over at The Health Care Blog.  First, it’s different to have to write “health care” instead of healthcare.  I personally am all for not using up or resources by adding the space between the two words.  Ihaveconsideredeliminatingspacesaltogether, but it gets confusing.  Iwon’tdothat.

One of the big differences I see is the perspective of the readers and commenters.  I write here for a group of people I largely consider friends, cohorts, or at least sympathetic to my cause.  After all, people are coming here by their own volition (I assume nobody is getting this blog forced upon them as some sort of punishment, although that may be a bad assumption).  But the readers at THCB (as we insiders call it) are much more argumentative and much more likely to be “experts” in the area of healthcare delivery.  Certainly the other folks writing there are far more sophisticated than me (not that that’s a hard thing), and are much more well-read in the area of HC reform.  The debates in the comments section are quite stimulating, although sometimes you have to wipe a little blood off of your screen. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*

KevinMD Suggests Insurance Companies Pay Primary Care Physicians More

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I’ve often given doctors too little credit when it comes to business decisions.

But, in an op-ed published at Reuters, physician Ford Vox argues otherwise.

He notes that doctors, indeed, have tremendous business sense:

How can anybody say that doctors don’t have business sense, when not only do most American physicians forge their way in small private practices, but new doctors lay their cards on the table every year? The competitiveness of residencies, where doctors train to become a pediatrician or a cardiologist, correlates strongly with the field’s earnings potential. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*

Why You Should Contribute To The Health Insurance Risk Pool

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Gather round boys and girls. Today’s lesson is on “risk pools.”

Before you pull out your iPhone to ward off the boredom you assume will come, know this: the concept of risk pools is at the heart of today’s healthcare reform debate.

To understand risk pools, you first have to understand the basic concept of insurance. Insurance is something you buy in case something happens. The more people buying the same type of insurance, the less risk the insurer faces that it will have to pay out for that aforementioned “something.” Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at A Medical Writer's Musings on Medicine and Health Care*

The Prius And Accelerator Problems: Don’t Believe The Hype

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I have a confession: I’ve been risking my life.

Yes, still driving a Prius.

I do buy that accelerator pedals can be mechanically jammed by a floor mat (though there’s clips on my car to hold it in place), but this unintended acceleration ‘panic’ is just that.  (If for no other reason that there’s now a flurry of cases of this, and none before it was the freak-out du jour). Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

Healthcare Reform: What We Should Learn From Massachusetts And Indiana

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Obamacare is fashioned after the Massachusetts healthcare reform plan. It leaves the administrative services in the hands of the healthcare insurance industry.

Indiana empowers consumers to control their healthcare dollars.

Therein lies the difference between ineffective and effective healthcare reform.

President Obama has even given the State of Massachusetts $8 billion dollars in bailout money to support the failed healthcare reform plan. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

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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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