The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic. When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance […]
I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared. But let’s […]
This is just a partial of a much longer commentary by Health Affairs on Employer healthcare insurance for single employees am employees with families. “Health Benefits In 2024: Higher Premiums Persist, Employer Strategies for GLP-1 Coverage and Family-Building Benefits,” Health Affairs. I have used two of the charts to emphasis what is occurring. The first […]
While I was raised Roman Catholic, I had already rejected the RCC teaching on abortion by the time I started high school. That teaching was not grounded in the Bible, nor was it grounded in biological science. Most human conceptuses never make it to term, making God the greatest abortionist of all time. And mammalian […]
If you must know before you dive in, this is a long read. It is also a presentation of a report. Very little editing has been done to it. Editing which may have been done is to make it clearer in explanation. I believe it presents a clear explanation of healthcare in the US. My […]
Vaccines are an unalloyed triumph of public health. That Donald Trump is attacking vaccines—any vaccines—is obscene. “ . . . on at least 17 occasions this year, Trump has promised to cut funding to schools that mandate vaccines. Campaign spokespeople have previously said that pledge would apply only to schools with COVID mandates. But speeches […]
Some of the worst performing cars ever made looked great on the outside and had serious mechanical, etc. problems. Made in America and were flashy but they could not mechanically perform as well or last. It took a while before many of us growing up started to walk past the flash and bought something more […]
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is everywhere—salad dressings, catsup, carbonated beverages. Fructose is sweeter, per unit mass, than cane sugar (sucrose), and apparently keeps better, so is a favored sweetener by the food industry. Unlike glucose, fructose in converted to free fatty acid in the liver and thus can contribute to hyperlipidemia, diabetes and heart […]
R. J. Sigmund September 29, 2024 The major Covid demographic metrics we track continued to trend lower this past week, but we have a new recombinant mutant out there that is multiplying quite rapidly and is forecast to become the dominant strain, probably just in time for the annual winter holidays infection wave. Among the […]
I was married by the time I started graduate school. I suspect that being in a committed relationship, and in particular with someone who was also a grad student, kept me centered during the stressful times. Perhaps these were different times, but a recent study shows that today’s PhD students are struggling with mental health […]