Public Health & Policy

A guest column by the American Medical Association, exclusive to KevinMD.com. Each September, the American Medical Association (AMA) is proud to recognize and honor the immense contributions women make to the House of Medicine. Such recognition is particularly appropriate this year. I count myself lucky to be joined by two exceptional women physicians in holding the offices of president, president-elect, and immediate past ...

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How do you react when presented with your quality data? In my experience, physicians generally respond by:

1. Ignoring the metrics
2. Arguing about why the metrics are wrong
3. Saying the metrics are stupid

A lot of doctors refuse to participate in the process of developing, reviewing and refining quality metrics. Although this has the definite advantage of feeling like you’re sticking it to “the man,” it feeds an unhelpful cycle that eventually hurts ...

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As voters fume about the high cost of health care, politicians have been targeting two well-deserved villains: pharmaceutical companies, whose prices have risen more than inflation, and insurers, who pay their executives millions in salaries while raising premiums and deductibles. Although the Democratic presidential candidates have devoted copious airtime to debating health care, many of the country’s leading health policy experts have wondered why they have given a total pass ...

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A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com. Because I work for a medical specialty society, I’m frequently asked by non-members why I believe they should belong to a medical professional society.  This is a particularly relevant question these days given the rapidly changing landscape of medicine and with physicians becoming ...

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For over a decade, Washington, DC has been busy with fixing health care. For over a decade, the same government bureaucracy, the same advocacy (read lobbying) organizations, the same expert think tanks, the same academic centers, the same business associations, with the same people hopping around from one entity to the next, have been generating and applying the same “innovative solutions” differentiated solely by their aggrandizing names. The result? Health ...

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The recent Philadelphia-, El Paso- and Dayton-area shootings brought all my memories back. As a pediatric pulmonary and critical care physician, I have been here so many times before. At 11:12 a.m. on a Wednesday last September, as I sat in my office enjoying a sunny day in the Midwest, I received a two-word text from my 15-year old high school junior: "I'm OK." "What happened?" I asked. "Active shooter at Greenway ...

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Personal journal entry, September 11, 2017: Sometimes we wear womanhood like a yoke — burdensome on our shoulders, as we carry the torch for younger women coming behind. Sometimes, we swing womanhood as a sword, slicing, and jousting for survival in a world that started without us, and in some cases, would be more than happy to continue that way. Sometimes, womanhood surrounds us thick as a fog, wrapping us in ...

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Why does e-cigarette maker Juul advertise its product on TV when cigarette ads are banned? The short answer: Because it can. For nearly 50 years, cigarette advertising has been banned from TV and radio. But electronic cigarettes — those battery-operated devices that often resemble oversized USB flash drives with flavored nicotine “pods” that clip in on the end — aren’t addressed in the law. Since launching its product in ...

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It has been a savage few months for reproductive rights, with 12 states passing 26 bills to ban abortion, including measures that ban abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, as well as attempting to outlaw safe methods of abortion. In the face of this extreme, unprecedented wave of attacks, several states pursued an alternative route, passing laws that expand the scope of abortion providers to ...

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