Palliative Care

Lighting the way to home-centered health careIn recent years I have frequently written about and discussed the need for a "parallel build-out" in order to achieve truly preventative care in the United States. This refers to the challenge on the one hand of better managing our current burden of chronic disease in mostly older Americans, […]

Silver Lining in High Gas Prices

Staying off the road has some protective effect Once again, across America, we’re experiencing shock at the gas pump. For those of us who are old enough, it recalls the days of Jimmy Carter’s administration, with gas lines, and calls for conservation, and a drop in the speed limit on interstate highways to 55 miles […]

Safe Medical Care – We Can Wish It or We Can Design It

Only a new medical system that incorporates safety systems designs will assure high quality medical care Virtually everyone faced with the prospect of undergoing anesthesia for surgery has a fear of the ‘what if’ adverse outcome. In the early 1980s, anesthetic deaths for all patients were estimated to be about 1 in 10,000 procedures! If […]

More On Physician Reimbursement, CMS, and the AMA’s RVS Update Committee (RUC)

An opinion on how the sole-source relationship between CMS and the AMA’s RUC threatens Medicare’s pilot on medical homes (Note: At Health Care Renewal, Dr. Roy Poses, a Clinical Associate Professor at Brown University’s School of Medicine, writes a consistently excellent blog on health care financial conflict . Both he and I have written extensively […]

Safe Driving For Seniors

Why in-person driver’s license renewal might be a good ideaMore than 40,000 Americans die each year in motor vehicle crashes. Many of the drivers involved in these crashes are senior citizens. Statistics show that motor vehicle fatality rates among senior drivers are on the rise, particularly for those drivers who are 85 or older. According […]

Indiana Revisited

April 4, 1968 Tomorrow is the Indiana Democratic Primary. One of the dominant themes, discussed on and off over the past few months, has been the issue of race, and the fears and emotions that come with it. In my lifetime – in my 60 years – I have seen fear before, in many shapes […]

Measles Cases from Overseas

Another factor reinforcing the need to immunize In January, February, March and April of 2008, 64 cases of Measles have been documented in 10 states across the US, and Dr. Anne Schuchat, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC says, “We haven’t seen the end of this.” The reason why? […]

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