Next week, Time magazine features a cover story that it says is “the longest single piece ever published by a single writer” in the magazine. Entitled "Bitter Pill: Why...
Category: hospitals
Next week, Time magazine features a cover story that it says is “the longest single piece ever published by a single writer” in the magazine. Entitled "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us," it is an exhaustive, morbidly fascinating, and ultimately deeply discouraging story about the almost unimaginable financial excesses and distortions in the U.S. health care industry.
It was written by Steven Brill, a journalist, lawyer, and entrepreneur and the founder of Court TV, American Lawyer , and Brill's Content. Brill's most recent book was Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (2011). ...
On Sunday, The New York Times published a disturbing investigation into the story behind a recommendation by city officials that "thousands of elderly,...
On Sunday, The New York Times published a disturbing investigation into the story behind a recommendation by city officials that "thousands of elderly, disabled and mentally ill residents remain in more than 40 nursing homes and adult homes in flood-prone areas of New York City" in the days and hours before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. The decision, the Times reports, had "calamitous consequences." (The story appears today, Dec. 3, in the print edition.)
The story's authors, Jennifer Preston, Sheri Fink, and Michael Powell, report that "it took at least three days for the Fire Department, the National Guard and ambulance crews from around the country to rescue over 4,000 nursing home and 1,500 adult home residents. Without working...
I've just finished the best story on health care that I expect to read this year--unless its author, Atul Gawande, decides to write another one.
In a piece in the current issue of ...
I've just finished the best story on health care that I expect to read this year--unless its author, Atul Gawande, decides to write another one.
In a piece in the current issue of The New Yorker, Gawande begins in an unlikely setting--at dinner on a Saturday night at The Cheesecake Factory with his two teenage daughters and three of their friends. He marvels at the restaurant. It has something for everyone--wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, and Bud Light and buffalo wings. The food is inexpensive, the place is packed, the atmosphere is Disney-like, and the staff is neatly dressed and attentive. "As for the food--can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?--it was delicious," Gawande writes.
Expensive restaurants serve as test kitchens for the restaurant chains, he writes, and some of the best...
We have long berated science writers for doing cursory rewrites of press releases when they should have done more careful reporting on their own. Now The Tennessean of Nashville has neatly sidestepped that problem by running the releases themselves, avoiding the irresponsible reporting.
...
We have long berated science writers for doing cursory rewrites of press releases when they should have done more careful reporting on their own. Now The Tennessean of Nashville has neatly sidestepped that problem by running the releases themselves, avoiding the irresponsible reporting.
Clicking on the Health and Fitness link on the paper's website today, I found Children will be more active if their friends are, written by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Songs from the heart, again by Vanderbilt; and...
In 2002, St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis told a psychiatrist he could...
In 2002, St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis told a psychiatrist he could lose his hospital privileges, following charges that he had delivered substandard care. The doctor sued hospital officials, and the hospital settled--agreeing to accept the doctor's resignation and not report him to a national databank of problem doctors.
His record, in other words, remained clean, despite the charges.
Jeremy Kohler and Blythe Bernhard of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did a nice feature using this case to highlight the shortcomings in medicine's...
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