The Healthcare Policy Podcast ® Produced by David Introcaso

Since suicides serve as a proxy measure for social isolation and loneliness (SIL), last week the CDC reported after declines in 2019 and 2020, suicides increased 7% in ‘21, particularly among those 25-44, to 48,343 returning their peak in 2018.  Over the past 2 decades suicides have increased 30%, they are now is the 12th leading cause of death.   Also in 2021, the CDC’s most recent bi-annual Yout...

The word Anthropocene has been used over the past 20 years to define the modern era during which time man has come to shape the environment.  This reality became significantly more pronounced with the advent of the nuclear Anthropocene.  As Prof. Higuchi explains in the introduction of  "Political Fallout," from 1945 to 1963, when the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) was signed by the US, the Soviet...

Listen Now (Listeners may recall Professor Abraham discussed 2021 ocean warming last year on January 18.) As a possible reminder, oceans, that cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface, absorb 93% of the heat energy trapped by greenhouse gases, termed ocean heat content (OHC).   Increased OHC in 2022 is not surprisingly when you consider global CO2 emissions increased by over two billion tons or rose by...

US healthcare fraud remains pervasive.  For example, this past November Pro Publica and The New Yorker published, “How the Visionary Hospice Movement Became a For-Profit Hustle."  (The article may remind readers of Eric Hoffer’s comment, “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.")  The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimate...

(This interview is dedicated to my friend Randy Lee, a dedicated public health nurse, who passed away earlier this week.)    Justin Smith in his book published earlier this year, The Internet is Not What You Think It Is , argued the internet is addictive, its use of algorithms leaves our lives warped and impoverished and despite these problems there is little or no federal regulatory oversight.  C...

Listeners are aware I recently posted two articles related to decarbonizing the healthcare industry.  One regarding Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits and another arguing CMS update two, 2016 regulatory rules to allow providers to use for solar microgrids for their emergency power supply.  Listeners are also aware I’ve conducted well over 25 climate crisis-related interviews over the past s...

Having posted over 25 related climate and health-related interviews over the past several years, podcast listeners are aware that the healthcare industry effectively exists in a harm-treat-harm cycle where providers cause patients harm via their greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution - that requires treatment causing providers to emit more harmful GHG pollution added - that leads to more patent harm - tha...

After heart disease cancer is the leading cause of mortality in the US at over 600,000 deaths annually.  Not surprisingly cancer care costs are considerable at approximately $210 billion of which approximately 10% is paid out of pocket.  This explains why in part up to 30% of Medicare beneficiaries without subsidies do not fill their anticancer prescriptions.  To make matters worse, the COVID pand...

This summer the planet once again experienced record temperatures, droughts, wildfires and extreme weather events.  Nevertheless, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency and OECD, global public subsidies of fossil fuel subsidies nearly doubled from 2020 to $700b in 2021.  The US economy still remains significantly dependent on coal use; it generates approx. 20% of the count...

Is at: https://substack.com/inbox/post/75107864 .  It opens with: In summarizing Professor Jedediah Purdy’s recent book, Two Cheers for Politics, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently wrote, “He [Purdy] is angry at the elites who supervise the bureaucratic capitalist state on behalf of their overlords while keeping up an elaborate masquerade of equality of opportunity.”   “Keeping up the masquerad...

Over the past few years federal policymakers have instituted healthcare price transparency.  Until last year, healthcare prices were largely, if not altogether, unknown to patients.   As of this past July 1 most group health plans and issuers of group or individual health insurance are required to publicly disclose pricing information.  As of this past January 1, providers were no longer able to s...

During its recent August 3rd hearing titled, “A System in Need of Repair: Addressing Organizational Failures of the U.S.’s Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network," Senate Finance Committee Chairman, Ron Wyden (D-OR), characterized efforts by the federally-contracted not for profit, UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharing) regarding organ procurement and transplant as grossly mismanaged and i...

Two weeks ago Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, announced the $739 billion Inflation Reduction (IRA) Act of 2022, compromise legislation agreed upon by Senator Manchin.  The bill includes just a few of the healthcare policy reform provisions House Democrats included in House legislation passed late last year, moreover extending expanded ACA marketplace insurance subsidies and allowing the Med...

Toxic Debt, An Environmental History Justice History of Detroit, just published by North Carolina University Press in its Justice, Power and Politics series, is largely a history of failure by federal, state and local government officials to regulate the auto industry’s extremely harmful environmental and consequential human health effects.  This failure is substantially explained by the replaceme...

In mid-June Columbia's Professor Frederica Perera and Stanford's Dr. Kari Nadeau published a review article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled, "Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children's Health."  The article provides an overview of the numerous health harms inflicted on children around the world resulting from fossil fuel combustion's released of massive amounts of airborne...

(P)Luck moreover details the nine year collaboration between identical twins, Dr. Alfred Sadler and Blair Sadler, an attorney, via their work at NIH,  Yale, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Hastings Center on Bioethics to advance national organ donation and transplantation policy, create the Physician Assistant profession, advance national emergency medical care and address related bioet...

Listeners are certainly aware of never ending US gun violence.  For example, since 37, moreover 4th grade children, were shot with 19 killed in Uvalde, Texas on May 24th, there have subsequently been at least 14 subsequent mass shootings killing at least 10 and wounding another 61.   Over the past ten years, or since the Sandy Hook , there have been 950 subsequent school shootings.   Concerning fe...

Coincident to the United Nations' 1992 creation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreement that governs international efforts to address the climate crisis/reduce Anthropocene warming, the UN also created the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that attempts to address or maintain biodiversity or mitigate declining biodiversity worldwide.  The CBD has been ratified by ev...

There are currently approximately 15,500 Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) in the US providing care to approximately 1.5 million Americans at an annual cost of approximately $175 billion.  Research has for decades demonstrated SNF care quality lags - made tragically evident by the ongoing COVID pandemic.  As MedPAC termed in its recent March report, the pandemic's effects on SNF patients have been...

This interview relates to numerous previous podcasts, however, to date I have not specifically discussed economic neoliberalism.  The effects of economic neoliberal theory (and its related political movement) underlies recent interviews with, for example, Dr. Steven Woolf and Prof. Kathleen Mullan Harris regarding declining US life expectancy, with Prof. Carol Graham regarding diseases and deaths...

Johns Hopkins is generally cited as the first to pilot the Hospital at Home care model over 20 years ago.   The model has been subsequently adopted by the VA and overseas in Australia, Canada, Israel and the UK among other countries.   CMS first tested the model in 2014 when it awarded Mount Sinai a grant to test the model, however, the model was not expanded having failed to the meet statutory cr...

In her just published Johns Hopkins University Press book, "Ethically Challenged, Private Equity Storms US Health Care," Professor Olson’s describes how and why Private Equity (PE) firms over the past forty years have purchased an ever-increasing number of acute and post-acute providers, physician groups, dental practices and a long list of health care ancillary services and what impacts PE firms...

This discussion intends to bring listeners more up to date regarding declining life expectancy in the US via discussion of the National Academy of Sciences' 2021 consensus report, "High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults."  This interview builds upon previous related discussions including my 2013 interview with Dr. Steven Woolf regarding the IOM’s related report, “Shorter Lives, P...

In a survey published late last year in The Lancet Planetary Health, coauthored by Dr. van Susteren, 10,000, 16-25 year olds across 10 countries including the US were surveyed to assess their level of climate anxiety and the beliefs about government responses to the climate crisis.  The survey found: 75% thought the climate crisis posed a frightening future; 66% were left afraid, anxious or sad; 6...

Listeners of this podcast are aware the US suffers from extreme wealth and income inequality.  (E.g., see my “The Unrecognized Tragedy of Working Class Immiseration” STAT News essay posted here on December 31st.)  Concerning CEO compensation in the health care industry, the highest ten paid CEO’s in 2020 were paid an average of $20 million.  By comparison, according to 2020 data from the Bureau of...