The Soon-to-Emerge Price War in Massachusetts Health Care

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, fresh from her disastrous campaign for Ted Kennedy's senate seat, is back on the job. Las...

Psychiatric Ethics in Boston

While reading yesterday's Boston Globe over coffee I encountered two stories about courtroom trials that raise central issues in psychia...

Facebook, Psychotherapy, and Professional Ethics

Melinda Lewis, who teaches Social Work at the University of Kansas, raised fascinating questions about social media and social work ethics o...

Where Are We Now in the Health Reform Process?

,In 1973, after Massachusetts was the only state not to vote for Richard Nixon's reelection, bumper stickers appeared all over the state...

At this stage, the U.S. House (last November) and Senate (last December) have each passed their own (different) health care reform bills. N...

Margie Omero examines polling data to get an idea of what message(s) voters in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate special election were sending ...

Should Royal Caribbean Cruise Ships be Landing in Haiti Now?

The January 17 Guardian shows this photo of a huge white Royal Caribbean cruise ship anchored offshore at Haiti with tourists floating in t...

The Looming Epidemic of Safety Net Hospital Dialysis Program Closures

I've done three recent posts on the crisis at Grady Hospital in Atlanta that has led to closure of its dialysis program. (See here , her...

Tony Judt Teaches us about Lou Gehrig's Disease and the Unthinkable

At the start of my residency training in psychiatry, my bookish colleagues and I asked the training director - "what should we be readi...

Michael Porter on the Employer Role in Health Care Reform

Here's what Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School strategy guru, said about employers in a New England Journal of Medicine article...

At this stage, with the U.S. House and Senate each having passed its respective version of health care reform in late 2009, we're waitin...

The Medical Council of India Sets Tough Rules about Pharma

Rema Nagarajan, a journalist friend who writes for the Times of India, brought to my attention a recent ruling of the Medical Council of Ind...

Tragic Choices at Grady Hospital (3) - Brinksmanship with Human Lives

Grady Hospital has done the right thing, as I predicted it would in a post last week ( here ): Clearly, a safety net provider is accountable...

Tragic Choices at Grady Hospital (2) - Undocumented Patients with End Stage Renal Disease

As I've described in a previous post ( here ), Grady Hospital in Atlanta closed its dialysis clinic on October 3. Grady is a prototypica...

A Remarkable Health Initiative at the University of New Hampshire

Watching the federal health reform process has strengthened my conviction that the changes our health system needs will have to come from th...