The Healthcare Policy Podcast ® Produced by David Introcaso

Anthropocentric warming, the greatest threat to human health and survival, disproportionately threatens children. Children pay the greatest climate penalty. Per the World Health Organization, children suffer more than 80% of climate crisis-related injuries, illnesses & deaths being more vulnerable to carbon-polluted air, extreme heat, drought and innumerable other climate-charged disasters and dis...

Frequent listeners of this podcast are well aware healthcare emits an immense amount of carbon pollution at over 600 million metric tons annually. This is substantially due to energy waste or inefficiency. For example, hospitals, that account roughly 35% of the industry’s GHG emissions, loses or forgoes tens billions in annual revenue or explicit and implicit lost opportunity costs. Healthcare pay...

Due to the federal government’s ongoing failure to effectively address the climate crisis, over 50 subnational entities have been taking increasingly aggressive steps to mitigate carbon pollution. Recently, Vermont (VT) and New York (NY) passed legislation to hold the oil and gas industry financial responsible for extreme weather events supercharged by their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. (Eleven...

Despite the fact US healthcare has $7.6 trillion market cap and is beyond capital intensive, industry executives have been loathe to divest in fossil fuels. For example, per “The Lancet’s” 2023 and 2024 annual “Countdown on Health and Climate” reports, between 2008 and 2023 of the 1,613 institutions committed to divesting in fossil fuels, only 28 were healthcare institutions and since 2018 only on...

US healthcare costs and spending are extreme made evident by the fact healthcare at a $5 trillion annually accounts for roughly half the global healthcare market. This reality led Princeton’s Nobel Prize Economist Angus Deaton to conclude in 2020, “the industry is a cancer at the heart of the economy.” Though healthcare costs are projected to rise 7 to 8%, this year, cost growth over the past 15 p...

At present, measles, one of the most contagious communicable diseases for which there is no treatment, disproportionately sickens - and kills - preschoolers. The outbreak is present today in 21 states ranging from Alaska to Vermont. As of last Friday, this year has already seen 607 confirmed cases, 72% of cases were among those age 5 to 19 and 97% of those infected were either unvaccinated or thei...

The Trump administration has made no secret it intends to aggressively enforce immigration laws, made evident by the recent arrest of a Columbia University grad student and green card holder on Columbia’s campus. Since the White House has repeatedly stated it intends to deport roughly all 12 million undocumented immigrants, this presents an immediate problem for healthcare providers who, in part,...

Two weeks after being sworn in, last Friday HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy announced, “effectively immediately, the [1971] Richardson Waiver is rescinded and is no longer policy of the Department.” He explained his decision by stating “the extra-statutory obligations of the Richardson Waiver impose costs on the Department and the public, are contrary to the efficient operation of the Department, and...

Last year was the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average. Since 90% of global warming is occurring in the ocean, due to the earth’s rising energy imbalance resulting from continuing and increasing GHG emissions, not surprisingly research published in “Environmental Research Letters” in late January concluded ocean temperatures for the 450...

Under the Biden administration the US once again became the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. Because all fossil fuels projects are politically constituted via permitting, etc., it is no surprise that of the nearly $7 trillion of fossil fuel investments since the 2015 Paris Accord, almost $2 trillion has been provided by six US banks including Citi. Cancer alley, the nickname for a stipe of...

To begin my 14th year podcasting . . . , per the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Unversity, as of last September there were 1,850 climate crisis-related cases filed in the US challenging climate policy under constitutional, federal statutory including securities and financial regulations, state law claims and under several other categories. Law suits have been and will continued to...

After heart disease cancer is the leading cause of death in the US. Forty percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer has always been a concern made worse by the COVID pandemic and the ongoing problem of un- and under-insurance. Another reason for concern is the increasing use of networked-based social media sites used to advertise...

The human rights/public health crisis known as US border policy serves as further proof of what Richard Hofstadter termed in 1964 the “paranoid style in American politics.”  To his credit Mr. Washington’s work attempts explain the recent phenomenon of closed or militarized borders here and around the world.  Closed borders, Mr. Washington explains, are responsible for untold human suffering that c...

Beyond roughly 1,700 NFL players, five to six million children participate in tackle football.  As a collision sport, brain (or TBI) and other neurological, bone, joint, ligament, muscle, organ and tendon injuries are commonly occur and frequently develop into long-term chronic conditions, particularly chronic pain.  Not surprisingly, the avg life expectancy of an NFL lineman - who played as few a...

Harvard Chan School of Public Health’s Dr. Troy Brennan argues in sum that because government Medicare, Medicaid and ACA marketplaces have grown and evolved, meaning the feds have improved their ability to competently regulate the healthcare market, employer-sponsored commercial plan coverage has become both comparatively unaffordable and increasingly irrelevant. Primarily for these reasons Dr. Br...

This century drug overdose deaths have equaled roughly 1.1 million largely due to overdose deaths among men that increased from 15,000 to 80,000.  As Dr. LeBaron notes drug overdose fatalities this century have exceeded the sum of all service member deaths in all wars in US history.  The vast majority of drug overdoses were opioid related that, e.g., increased from 50,000 to 82,000 between 2019 an...

Climate denial remains rife in the US. For example, in Washington, D.C., nearly 25% of the current members of Congress are, via their public statements, climate denialists. As for Health and Human Services (HHS), the department has steadfastly refused to promulgate any regulations to mitigate the healthcare industry’s massive carbon footprint that, for example, amounts to well over four times the...

In the recent past, hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition have (re)gained policymakers’ interest largely due to the COVID pandemic and accelerating climate breakdown – that has among other things reduced the growth of global agricultural production by 30-35%.  As a result, last year 2.8 billion of the world’s population could not afford a healthy diet.  In the US, over 40 million Americans rece...

In late 2020 the Congress passed the No Surprises Act largely intended to address patient “surprise,” or out of network bills, typically the result of ER visits. Should settlement between the healthcare provider, e.g., hospital, and insurance company fail, the bill created an arbitration, termed Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR), process. To date the number of disputes going to arbitration have...

Over the past four decades the US has, per a 2019 JAMA-published study, made a “clear lack of progress on health equity.” Health equity or disparities have almost certainly worsened over the past five years due to COVID and accelerating climate breakdown.  For example, air pollution in 2021 killed over 8 million globally including 2,000 children under age five daily. Foul air, nearly entirely the...

Mr. Burger joins me to discuss climate crisis-related litigation here and abroad and its effectiveness in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Dedicated listeners may recall I interviewed Mr. Burger in May 2020 regarding the Trump administration’s unwinding of numerous environmental regulations.  Michael Burger  is the Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Universi...

Climate-related health effects are typically defined or limited to those resulting from extreme weather events, exacerbations of chronic disease and increases in vector borne diseases. Unfortunately, very little attention or even recognition is afforded the effects the climate crisis has on brain health largely via climate-fueled neurotoxin exposure. Mr. Aldern’s valuable if not indispensable work...

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court in June 2022 reversed the court’s previous 1973 Roe v Wade decision, and 20 related cases, wiping out a half century of constitutional protections for women’s reproductive rights.  In Dobbs, the court found the Constitution now excludes a woman’s control over her body as well as the possible continuation of her life.  Compelled pre...

Over the past 12 years this podcast has discussed increasing corporate dominance of healthcare delivery, made evident in part by the fact the healthcare market is highly concentrated and highly leveraged, e.g., over the past decade private equity has spent roughly $1 trillion to acquire physician practices.  The corporate practice of medicine (CPOM) is problematic because allowing for corporate me...

Research published last month in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences by Prof. Abraham and his colleagues once again show ocean temperatures, more specifically ocean heat content (OHC), once again dramatically increased in 2023.  (As I noted last year, many believe OHC is the best way of measuring anthropocentric warming because it is comparatively less variable on a year-to-year basis.)  Oceans, that...