Welcome to American HealthScare

Thank you for your interest in making American healthcare more affordable

I look forward to your comments

Member Login
Lost your password?
Not a member yet? Sign Up!

Blog

I Still Get Butterflies on Match Day

March 24, 2014

I am on the teaching staff at the John Peter Smith Hospital Family Medicine Residency in Fort Worth. The editor of the Primary Care Progress blog asked me and some other faculty and residents across the country to write about the match process. The “match” is the system where we rank...
Read More »

More Evidence on the Limits of the PCMH

March 17, 2014

A recent article in JAMA showed the disappointing results of a 3-year study of over 100 certified patient-centered medical homes in southeast Pennsylvania. Basically, it showed only 1 of 11 quality measures improved and utilization and costs were not reduced. In one of the most narrow-minded statements by the AAFP ever,...
Read More »

A Visit to Britain’s National Health Service

March 9, 2014

I had the great privilege and excitement of seeing Britain’s National Health Service up close and personal this past fall. My primary guide was Dr. Helen Stokes-Lampard, who is the honorary Treasurer of the Royal College of General Practitioners. She is very unlike her stuffy title. She is very down to...
Read More »

The Country Family Physician is In

February 24, 2014

I know some of you have seen this already, but I thought I’d broadcast this piece one more time. This is a link to a post I wrote for Primary Care Progress. In it, I talk about examples of how family physicians are still faithfully serving the needs of nearly 70...
Read More »

Mammography 2014

February 16, 2014

I assume many of you have heard by now of the Canadian randomized controlled mammography study that found that 25 years later, there was no difference in breast cancer death rates between 40-59 year-old women who had mammograms vs. those who did not. I won’t go into a lot of further...
Read More »

RUC and the Special Deal of the Ologists

February 10, 2014

This article received some notice when it was first published in August. Haley Edwards writing for Washington Monthly does a great job exposing the insider deals and duplicity of the AMA’s Relative Value Update Committee, or RUC (commonly pronounced “ruck”). This is the AMA’s committee that advices Congress on updates to...
Read More »

CTs and Cancer

February 2, 2014

In a wonderfully strongly-worded piece in the New York Times, Drs. Rita Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman talk about the future physical harms of excessive CT scans now. They state that 1 in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan each year. A study by the National Cancer Institute estimated that CT scans...
Read More »

Obscene Ologist Charges

January 26, 2014

I assume many readers of American HealthScare have already read this piece from the New York Times. But just in case you haven’t, if you have any anti-nausea medicine at home, take it 30 minutes before reading this. I continue to be flabbergasted that the private sector allows this to happen....
Read More »

Humility and the Flu

January 20, 2014

Many parts of the U.S. are in the throes of the flu season. And as usual, plenty of misinformation is circulating and passed from one person to another, just like the flu virus. The good news is that unlike more egregious examples of waste and greed in the U.S. healthcare system,...
Read More »

Supporting Primary Care – Little Talk and No Action

January 13, 2014

Here we go again. There is yet another round of evidence of how the physician workforce hole we’ve dug for ourselves keeps getting deeper, but there has been still no substantive payment reform on the government side (Medicare/Medicaid) or the private payer side. One recent study appeared in the journal Academic...
Read More »

Important News!

American Health$care is HERE!!! Order today at amazon.com

Archives