Why the Health Insurance Industry Supported Obamacare

July 29th, 2010 - 5:52 am

Why Big Health Insurance Supported Obamacare, Part II Podcast:

 
The fact that the health insurance industry supported Obamacare from the very beginning was entirely missed by the mainstream press. This is perhaps understandable, since a) the mainstream press does not understand the dynamics of the healthcare system, and b) during the Obamacare drama, the [...]

Author: DrRich No Responses

Another Reason He Should Have Kept the Bust

July 27th, 2010 - 7:11 am

Why Big Health Insurance Supported Obamacare, Part I Podcast:

 
When President Obama moved into the White House in January of 2009, he found in the Oval Office a bust of Sir Winston Churchill, a gift from Great Britain to the United States during the Reagan presidency, a gift meant to symbolize the close ties [...]

Author: DrRich 4 Responses

How Fat People Reduce Global Warming

July 20th, 2010 - 7:08 am

Podcast:

 
When DrRich was a little tyke, he always loved it when Uncle Harry came to visit. Uncle Harry was a large, rotund man with a ready smile and a jolly laugh, who was genuinely delighted to spend hours entertaining little DrRich and all the other children with his jokes, stories, magic tricks, and [...]

Author: DrRich No Responses

Global Warming and the Importance of Bias in Scientific Progress

July 16th, 2010 - 7:32 am

Podcast:

 
DrRich is relieved to learn that the world’s most famous global warming experts have now been exonerated by three separate formal reviews. Dr. Michael Mann from Penn State University was cleared by a review conducted by Penn State University. Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), [...]

Author: DrRich No Responses

E&M Guidelines Undermine Patient Care, and That’s The Point

July 12th, 2010 - 7:03 am

Podcast:

 
Since the late 1990s, American physicians have labored under a set of tortuous documentation requirements imposed upon them by our government. The E&M guidelines (for “evaluation and management”), apply to the documentation that physicians are now obligated to provide in support of their Medicare billing. The E&M guidelines, first instituted in 1995 and [...]

Author: DrRich 4 Responses

More Arguments for Withholding Crestor

July 7th, 2010 - 7:34 am

Podcast:

 
DrRich’s last post addressed a recent issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine which, strikingly, was largely dedicated to trashing the JUPITER study. The JUPITER study was a landmark clinical trial in which giving the statin drug Crestor to apparently healthy individuals who were at increased risk of cardiovascular disease (and most particularly, [...]

Author: DrRich 6 Responses

Why They’re Trashing the JUPITER Trial

July 2nd, 2010 - 9:29 am

Podcast:

 
This week, the Archives of Internal Medicine published four (four!) articles assaulting the legitimacy and the importance of the JUPITER trial, a landmark clinical study published in 2008, which showed that certain apparently healthy patients with normal cholesterol levels had markedly improved cardiovascular outcomes when taking a statin drug. Superficially, at least, the [...]

Author: DrRich 9 Responses

Dr. House and the Great American Experiment

June 28th, 2010 - 8:54 am

Podcast:

 
DrRich’s Independence Day Address to his Loyal Readers: DrRich has always found it fascinating that the television show, “House MD” has remained so popular for so long. After all, Gregory House embodies the polar opposite of what we all say we want in a modern physician. House may be brilliant, but he’s antisocial, [...]

Author: DrRich One Response

Why the American NICE Will Not Be Like the British NICE

June 22nd, 2010 - 8:26 am

Podcast:

 
The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has now issued its final ruling on the new cancer drug, Nexavar, which has proven effective in treating liver cancer. NICE will not cover Nexavar “because its high cost could not be justified by its marginal benefit.” In a well-designed randomized clinical trial, Nexavar [...]

Author: DrRich 3 Responses

Now On Kindle!

July 3rd, 2010 - 11:30 am

Why should you still read DrRich’s book, Fixing American Healthcare, even though our leaders have just fixed American healthcare for us? Four reasons. First, DrRich humbly suggests, you may be insufficiently paranoid about American healthcare, whether it’s the style of healthcare we have now, or the New Style Healthcare that is rapidly coming our way [...]

Author: DrRich 2 Responses

Rebuilding

May 29th, 2010 - 5:11 pm

Hi, it’s me, DrRich. My site was badly hacked, including my database files, and all attempts at repair failed. Consequently I have had to wipe my servers clean, and begin rebuilding everything from scratch. This will take some time. Fortunately, I have all my posts saved in text files. I will not be reposting all [...]

Author: DrRich 5 Responses

Limiting Individual Prerogatives in Healthcare

May 20th, 2010 - 11:24 pm

Now that President Obama’s healthcare reform has become the law of the land, it is time for us to prepare ourselves for the real fight. Namely, will individual Americans ultimately be restrained, by law or by subterfuge, from using their own resources to pay for their own medical care?  This notion is not as far-fetched [...]

Author: DrRich No Responses

Healthcare Reform For The Unwashed Masses

May 18th, 2010 - 9:20 pm

Sure, nobody’s read the bill, and even if they had, what Nancy said is true: To find out what’s in the bill, they first had to pass it (so the bureaucrats could translate it into the hundreds of thousands of regulations that would finally determine its meaning). But there’s no need to wait for the [...]

Author: DrRich No Responses

Medical Ethics Smack Down! DrRich vs. the ACP

May 10th, 2010 - 11:48 am

In early 2010, The Covert Rationing Blog and the ACP Advocate Blog were named finalists in the 2009 Medical Weblog Award Competition, in the category of Best Health Policy/Ethics Blog. DrRich, who has been a vocal critic of the “New Ethics” espoused by the ACP (and other professional organizations), took the opportunity to challenge the [...]

Author: DrRich No Responses