PBM’s – Their Origins and Parentage.

With the controversy swirling over insulin pricing, and sticker shock for seniors meeting deductibles on their Medicare Part D choices, it’s useful to shine a light on PBM’s – their origins and parentage. They would, of course, prefer to remain in the shadows, managing a vast array of legal kickbacks with others within the Medical-Industrial […]

ACA – A Ticking Time Bomb For Republicans.

Mike Magee Watching the Amy Conan Barrett hearings last week, I couldn’t help but wonder who exactly was running the Republican Death Star at the moment. Specifically the Supreme Court candidate’s vulnerability based on an outspoken disdain for the ACA seemed to release a quiet, below-the-surface, Democratic scream “Go ahead. Make our day!” For nearly […]

The House of God Has Become a House of Cards.

Mike Magee In a career that included exposure to every level of America’s vast and collusive Medical Industrial Complex, I spent nearly two decades enmeshed in the senior management of hospitals. These ranged from a 90 bed rural hospital just south of Brattleboro, VT, to the prestigious and historic Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, the nation’s […]

A Health System Disconnected and Conflicted in an Un-united United States.

Mike Magee Governors like Andrew Cuomo of New York have discovered the price for inefficiency and conflicts of interest in the face of the Covid-19 epidemic. As he said yesterday, “No one hospital has the resources to handle this. There has to be a totally different operating paradigm where all those different hospitals operate as […]

Johns Hopkins MBA Bets Future On Ever-Expanding Medical-Industrial Complex

Mike Magee What do you do if you are a highly ranked university, with one of the best nursing, medical and public health schools in the country, and applications for entry into your traditional 2-year MBA program have declined 14% over the past 5 years? Well, the obvious answer is, you go out and hire […]

Letting Academic Physicians Off The Hook.

Mike Magee In 2004, when I read Dr. Marcia Angell’s book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It”, I agreed with everything she wrote. How couldn’t I? At the time, I had a front row seat inside the largest pharmaceutical company in the world and managed a substantial […]

Doctors or Entrepreneurs? The Triple Mission Problem.

Mike Magee This week’s blockbuster investigative article in Science doesn’t pull punches. Its’ headline: “Investigation reveals widespread double dipping in NIH program to pay off school debt.” The article cites incontrovertible evidence of taxpayer dollar support for student debt loan forgiveness being granted to many clinical investigators (more than half MD’s) who are on for-profit […]

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