Personal Responsibility for Health

Taking personal responsibility for health involves a commitment to adopting a healthy lifestyle — frequent exercise, not smoking, and weight control. The ramifications of this responsibility recently received wide media coverage when surgeons at Adelaide’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital declined to perform certain elective surgery on patients who are obese or who smoke.

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Joe Biden’s New Health Care Agenda

The details vary but the story is always the same: every candidate’s big plans for health care morph, shrink, and change after they are elected and confronted with new political and economic circumstances. That will be true in spades for President-elect Biden. Very narrow margins in both houses of Congress means two of the big ideas he campaigned on may get a hearing but are highly unlikely to pass, the public option and early eligibility for Medicare.

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Changing the structure of health care delivery systems

By Joshua Freeman, M.D.

In an important series of three articles beginning on the Sunday before the New Year, “Doctors Inc.”, Alan Bavley of the Kansas City Star looked at the increasing acquisition of physician practices by hospitals, and the impact this has on access to, quality of, and cost of health care for patients. The first article, “Medicine goes corporate as more physicians join hospital payrolls,” describes the “what,” that:

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