The Doctor Is In

Michael Cannon over at Cato takes issue with my conclusions regarding pay-for-performance — the federal and third-party steamroller which is the health care bureaucracy’s latest ill-considered idea for reigning in health care costs. In pay-for performance, guidelines for quality (read: less expensive) care are established, and those physicians who color between the lines get paid […]

Lost in the dustbin of inconvenient memories, left behind in the light-speed pace of internet information mania is the story of the deaths of patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A physician and two nurses were arrested after the Louisiana District Attorney charged them with murder, accusing them […]

If you’ve been following some of my previous posts on the insanity of the U.S. health care system, such as the Maze series, you will recall the looming ogre in payment “reform” called pay for performance. Medicare, and the me-too sycophants in the insurance industry, have been promoting and implementing a payment system which […]

Rarely a day goes by when I do not receive, from my friendly Post-person, some promotional material. Much of it is trivial (pens emblazoned with drug logos), most of it banal (copies of stupid marketing materials which insult the intelligence, like this), all of it unsolicited.
But there are rare occasions when something truly transformational arrives […]

A recent post over at the Advice Goddess regarding access to health care caught my eye. Like many such posts, there was a brisk repartee in the comment section on the topic of fixing our daunting health care access problems. Many of the comments were knowledgeable and informative; some, as is always the case, were […]

One of my areas of professional expertise is infertility surgery, specifically reversal of vasectomy. Vasectomy is a very common form of permanent birth control, with an estimated 500,000 to 700,00 procedures performed a year in the U.S. It is a procedure which is devilishly simple to perform, while maddeningly difficult to repair. The vas deferens […]

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) addressed an interesting new phenomenon in medical practice: the micro-practice. Physicians, weary of being forced to see large volumes of patients because of HMO requirements or financial pressures, coupled with high practice overhead and burgeoning paperwork, are striking out in a very different direction. Some […]

I’ve recently referenced an excellent article on the huge gap between hype and reality with embryonic stem cell research (as opposed to the real and growing applications of adult stem cells), and Michael Fumento again points out the huge gap between myth and reality here (HT: Instapundit). Maybe the word is starting to get out […]