February - 2015

The Great Myth: Why Health Care Reform is Failing both Patients and Medicare

A Novel Way to Present Health Information

Deception about Dementia: Why Early Detection can be Dangerous

Curing Medicare to be republished by Cornell University Press in 2016

Cancer screening: how conventional wisdom, quality indicators, and payment incentive equals poor ou

Rat Poison in the Nursing Home

PPI Use and Heart Attacks: Really?

The Real Value of Primary Care

The CDC and diseases of the elderly: Less factual than advertised

Baltimore Sun Op Ed Post

The Perils of Excessive Testing, Part 2: Cardiac Tests and Procedures

Part 2 of the ACA Series: The new unpleasant face of primary care.

The increased regulatory burdens placed on primary care practices by HIPAA, the ACA, Medicare regulation/reforms, meaningful use, and novel modes of care (e.g., medical homes, ACO’s, chronic care notes, ect.) have pushed many doctors out of traditional primary care arrangements and into affiliations with hospitals. I am part of a 5 provider practice (2 doctors, 3 nurse practitioners) that is autonomous and has sufficiently reduced overhead to allow us to have small patient p

The CDC and diseases of the elderly: Less factual than advertised

The following is part of a report that I wrote for the Lown Institute website. You can access the report by clicking the link: LOWN ARTICLE While the CDC should be lauded for its efforts to curb the spread of disease, its recent announcements about pneumonia vaccine and Tamiflu have raised suspicions about its motives and its accuracy. The following article summarizes some of what has transpired. When CDC director Tom Frieden stated unequivocally that neuraminidase inhibit

The Impact of the ACA on Primary Care Part One: what we know now.

In the next several blogs I will explore how the ACA has impacted primary care as of 2015. In my book and my previous blogs I have talked about how quality indicators and electronic medical records, in their current forms, can detract from the ability of primary care physicians to provide optimal health care to their patients, can disrupt the doctor-patient relationship to the detriment of both doctor and patient, can squander physician time with meaningless tasks that do no

ACA Reform and the Medical Home: The Newest Primary Care Initiative

Part of the ACA’s success hinges on its ability to reduce the cost of medical care by better managing chronic illness and by averting hospitalization. Ten billion dollars has been invested in new projects through Medicare’s Innovation Center, much of the money flowing through hospitals and large organizations. In a previous blog we discussed how an expensive program financed by the Innovation Center, designed to reduced hospital readmissions, has not shown any progress afte