The Healthcare Policy Podcast ® Produced by David Introcaso

This interview discusses the recently published series of ten articles edited by Professors Gibson-Davis and Heather D. Hill titled, "Wealth Inequality and Child Development: Implications for Policy and Practice," appearing in the August issue of The Russel Sage Foundation's Journal of the Social Sciences.  The US suffers both extreme economic inequality.  For example, per June Federal Reserve dat...

Ken Langa's dust jacket summary appropriately states, the authors, "make clear that, in order to understand health and cognitive decline more fully, we must consider the quality and inclusiveness of the environment through which we travel from birth to death."  Alzheimer's or brain health should not be simply conceived or understood, the authors' argue, at a biological level but also the result of...

Approximately 100,000 Americans are waiting an organ transplant.  The vast majority will are awaiting a a kidney - that, on average, will take five years.   Approximately 20 Americans die every day awaiting an organ.  These and related statistics rank the US well below other developed countries.  For example, only 30% of US kidney failure patients have a functioning transplant and only 3% have rec...

This past Tuesday Senate Democrats passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution what would allow Congressional Democrats to fund significant health care reforms along with education, immigration, climate crisis and other termed “care economy” policies.  Among other healthcare policies Congressional Democrats are working to fund are expansions to Medicare coverage, boost by $400 billion Medicaid Home a...

As listeners are likely aware the Biden administration has given priority to addressing health equity, meaning distributing health-related resources based on recipients’ needs.   This is not surprising since, in part, research published in JAMA in June 2019 by Zimmerman and Anderson concluded, "there has been a clear lack of progress in health equity during the past 25 years in the US."  (Think: t...

In late May I interviewed John Kotcher regarding his survey that showed physicians worldwide had a limited understanding of the climate crisis and its health effects.  For example, 41% said they lacked sufficient knowledge to discuss the topic and less than half also believed the climate crisis is responsible for heat-related illnesses and increases in vector borne diseases.  Since the climate cri...

The US prison and jail population is the largest in the world at two million.  With 4.2% of the world’s population, the US accounts for roughly 25% of the world’s prisoners.  African Americans, at 13% of the general population, account for 34% of the prison population.  Much like the effect COVID-19 has had Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) residents, prisons and jails have also constituted killing f...

In The Hospital, Mr. Alexander provides an account of Bryan, Ohio's Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers (or CHWCs) hospital’s efforts to stay solvent between 2018 and 2020.  The work, in many ways is a companion to Nick Freudenberg's "At What Cost, Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health (I interviewed Prof. Freudenberg on May 20th), is particularly timely because rural hospitals, that ser...

Last October India and South Africa appealed to the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive patent or intellectual property (IP) rights such that COVID-19 production and distribution worldwide could be accelerated.   As of a month ago 80% of COVID-19 vaccines had gone to those in in high or upper middle income countries while only 0.2% had gone to those in low income countries - meaning it w...

Listen Now Podcast listeners are aware US healthcare significantly underperforms.   Among numerous other statistics, despite spending approximately twice what comparative countries spend on healthcare, the US has highest rates of preventable deaths.  Even wealthy Americans are more likely to, for example, die during childbirth, from cancer and from heart attacks than those in 12 comparative countr...

Listen Now Despite a long history of engagement in various political and social and issues, for example, from the nuclear test ban treaty to the global AIDS epidemic, healthcare professionals have been largely absent in addressing the climate crisis.  This helps explain why the health care industry has been, in sum, absent from addressing what the World Health Organization has defined as the great...

Listen Now As the book's dust jacket notes, At What Cost, Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health [ recently published by Oxford University Press] confronts how globalization, financial speculation, monopolies, and control of science and technology have enhanced the ability of corporations and their allies to overwhelm influences of government, family, community, and faith.  As corporations man...

Listen Now Over the past several weeks the Biden administration has incrementally released proposed infrastructure policies under the title, "Build Back Better."  The White House defines infrastructure to include human capital that under grid the functioning of the economy.   (As Bryce Covert noted in yesterdays The New York Times, Lanham Act funds, initially used to fund infrastructure deemed cri...

Listen Now In her recently published volume, co-authored with Stacey Colina, Countdown: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, discuss the relationship between our exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the dramatic decline in global fertility rates over roughly the past half ce...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the last of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion is with UCSF's Dr. Paula Braveman and Dr. Laura Gottlieb and was conducted in early January.   As you will hear this podcast like all others is introduced by ProMedica's CEO,  Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persua...

Listen Now Despite coverage gains obtained under the ACA, today, approximately 13% of Americans or over 30 million are uninsured and 43 percent or approximately 115 million Americans are under-insured.  Broadly defined, the public option is a government regulated if not managed health insurance plan that pays reimbursement rates comparable to Medicare or significantly lower than commercial insurer...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the seventh of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion is with Humana's Dr. Kate Goodrich and was conducted in late December.  As you will hear this podcast like all others is introduced by ProMedica's CEO,  Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persuade federal healthcar...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the sixth of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion is with Georgetown University Professor Judy Feder and was conducted in late November.  As you will hear this podcast like all other eight is introduced by ProMedica's CEO,  Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persuad...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the fifth of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion is with Arnold Ventures' Dr. Mark Miller and conducted in late November.  As you will hear this podcast like all other eight is introduced by ProMedica's CEO,  Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persuade federal heal...

Listen Now (Please note: Because of poor sound quality, this interview was rerecorded on March 22nd.)   Discussing the climate crisis sooner or later begs the Gaia Hypothesis.  Simply explained, the Gaia Hypothesis, proposed in the early 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, argues all of planetary life works autonomously to maintain environmental conditions within a narrow range of habitabil...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the fourth of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion is with Harvard economics Professor Michael Chernew and was conducted in late November.  As you will hear this podcast like all others is introduced by ProMedica's CEO, Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persuade fe...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the third of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion with Dr. Amol Navathe was conducted in late December.  As you will hear this podcast like all others is introduced by ProMedica's CEO, Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persuade federal healthcare officials to pursu...

Listen Now Per the essay I posted last week concerning federal policy makers' indifference toward the health harm imposed on Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries via the healthcare industry's carbon emissions, I thought it useful to discuss however limitedly why and how the US healthcare industry  can rapidly transition to the use of clean or renewable energy resources, i.e., wind, water and solar...

Listen Now (As explained on the podcast home page, this is the second of eight interviews concerning federal healthcare policy reform.  This discussion with Dr. Berenson was conducted in mid-November.  As you will hear this podcast like all others is introduced by ProMedica's CEO, Randy Oostra.  This series was produced in an effort to interest or persuade federal healthcare officials to pursue su...

Listen Now Last year Island Press published Planetary Health, Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, considered the first textbook for the field of planetary health.  As the title suggests, the work provides an overview of our planet's health under the Anthropocene era.  As the work notes, per work by the Global Footprint Network we have been increasingly living beyond our environmental means, or...