The Season for Giving

Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton. He is a philosopher by trade who has thought a lot about poverty, distribution of wealth, and why and how the wealthy give back or don’t. If you’d like to see him in action, look in Dec. 18’s New York Times (What should a billionaire give, […]

The Language of Values

The other day I came across an inspirational statement from the UK’s General Medical Council. Putting aside whether or not that system is good, bad, or somewhere in-between, the language resonated with me. Here it is: The duties of a doctor registered with the UK’s General Medical Council (2006) Patients must be able to trust […]

The Discussion at Consumer Health World

Health Politics is on location this week at the Consumer Health World conference in Washington D.C., and we’re getting a close-up look at just how quickly the consumer empowerment movement is taking hold. The focus here is on giving patients more choice and control over their health care decisions, largely by giving them more control […]

Workplace Employees Are Discovering Each Other

I’ve been spending a great deal of time over the past few years advancing the notion of leveraging technology to expand connectivity efficiently and beyond normal geographic borders. Mainly I’ve been concerned about “health connectivity,” which encompasses three things: 1) Efficiently connecting members of the health care team, including informal family caregivers. 2) Connecting those […]

HPM: Aligning Interests of Employers and Employees

In this week’s Health Politics program, I discuss a new way of viewing health in the workplace called Health and Productivity Management, or HPM. As you probably know, and as I’ve discussed in previous Health Politics programs, our unique American approach to health care — defining coverage as a non-transferable benefit of employment, an approach […]

Trans Fats: Out of the Frying Pan in NYC

Over the past few years, I’ve done several Health Politics pieces on obesity — dealing with the economic, health, social and scientific aspects of the challenge. I remember thinking that once a figure was put on all this excess morbidity and mortality, the political apparatus would begin to turn its wheels. And it has. Today, […]

Plan B Shenanigans: The Politics of Doubt and the Responsibility of Medical Leaders

Last month, Frank Davidoff, M.D., editor emeritus of the Annals of Internal Medicine, and James Trussell, Ph.D., director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, went public on the shenanigans surrounding the regulatory process to approve the emergency contraceptive Plan B for over-the-counter (OTC) use. Both had been members of an FDA advisory committee […]