The healthcare industry is the fifth biggest in the United States, contributing more than $1.2 trillion to the Gross Domestic Product. But according to the Siegal+Gale Global Simplicity Index, healthcare ranks dead last out of 25 industries in the United States for simplicity of experience.
If you try to use Medicare Advantage, figuring out which doctors are available (and where) can be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Medicare Advantage is the government-subsidized, private alternative to the traditional public Medicare program. It has had strong enrollment growth for years.
As a physician, I recently have been devastated by the news that the hospital in which I practice and teach is closing. Philadelphia Academic Health System, LLC, the owner of Hahnemann University Hospital, announced on June 26th that the 171-year old institution would close in about 70 days.
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, at a jungle hospital teeming with patients, two U.S. medical students are racing to save a man's life. Alex Gorin and Diana Partida are rushing the patient to the facility’s only CT scanner in hopes of identifying the source of a mysterious bacterial infection.
The Trump administration this week will announce a series of initiatives to encourage more kidney transplants and treatment at home, the start of a process intended to overhaul a market in which the federal government spends more than $100 billion per year.
In two essays, “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1988, the critic Susan Sontag observed that you can learn a lot about a society from the metaphors it uses to describe disease. She also suggested that disease itself can serve as a metaphor—a reflection of the society through which it travels.