health policy

To Get Your Medical Bills Covered, Be The Squeaky Wheel

A man was hospitalized for a heart attack. Insurance paid $55,000 and he was left with a bill of nearly $110,000. Could you, too, have gotten it dropped to less than $800?

U.S. public health agencies struggle to endorse an obvious solution to a true public health menace. Hopefully, the UK Parliament will provide a much-needed boost to the forces of common sense.

It's time doctors and patients take charge of what goes on in the exam room or at the hospital bedside. Inane, tedious tasks that co-opt such visits are out of touch with real world medical practice.

When health insurers keep trying to practice medicine without a license, we all lose.

If health care fixes continue to undermine the doctor-patient relationship, financial costs won't be the only price paid.

A recent Pennsylvania Supreme court ruling, recognizing what it means to be a doctor, is not a solution but a problem. Authors in The New England Journal of Medicine beg to differ.

With a constant surge of competing profit centers fragmenting healthcare, more layers than ever are conspiring to erode the doctor-patient relationship. Here is a guide to being your own advocate. It will help reduce your anxiety, eliminate unnecessary suffering and improve outcome and recovery.

First fallacy: the mere existence of an opioid pill is why there is a crisis. Finding solutions requires proper identification of a problem. The time is now for the public narrative to follow suit.

The negative impact of (1) "at-all-costs" breastfeeding campaigns, (2) the political zeal of "lactivism" and (3) societal pressures have done a proven disservice to women and families. So much so that formal health policy had to be changed.

Can the FDA's tactics – to impact the current opioid problem – also predict its successor? The goal is to head off escalation before problems are crises, and the move is a departure from the status-quo, reactive nature of prior policies.