Author: Mike Magee

Over the past few years, I’ve done several Health Politics pieces on obesity — dealing with the economic, health, social and scientific aspects of the challenge. I remember thinking that once a figure was put on all this excess morbidity and mortality, the political apparatus would begin to turn its wheels. And it has. Today, […]

Last month, Frank Davidoff, M.D., editor emeritus of the Annals of Internal Medicine, and James Trussell, Ph.D., director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, went public on the shenanigans surrounding the regulatory process to approve the emergency contraceptive Plan B for over-the-counter (OTC) use. Both had been members of an FDA advisory committee […]

This week’s Health Politics program about global warming may give you some hope that a plan of attack — one that would better control emissions, help us consume less energy, and might involve changes to public policy — is finally coming together. This, of course, is good news. But I realize you might be asking […]

In this week’s Health Politics program, I discuss what I call a “Lifespan Planning Record.” You may not have heard this term before, but I’ve been talking it up over the last few months because I strongly believe it’s one of the key elements that will be involved in fixing our health care system and […]

The United States spent $327 billion last year on Medicare. That amount startles some. But what is more striking is that 27% of that, some $88 billion, was spent on the care of patients in their last year of life. Now Dartmouth Medical School, the home of the original Jack Wennberg variability studies in the […]

Kyoto aside, developed world progress is poor-to-none when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions. UN expert Yvo de Boer told The Wall Street Journal, “The rising trend is the worrisome part of it…” Who’s at fault? Well the U.S., for one. But surprisingly, our 2004 numbers were up only 1.3% from 2000. In the same […]

On November 2, 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain announced the start of a joint research program in Web science. Ben Shneiderman, computer science professor at the University of Maryland, had this reaction, “Computer science is at a turning point, and it has to go beyond algorithms and […]