For years, the bottleneck for AI in healthcare has not been the technology. It has been the billing code. Original Medicare pays for visits, procedures, and a defined set of activities — none of which describe what an autonomous system actually does when it manages a patient’s blood pressure...
Patients First PAC is the first political action committee in Arkansas built by patients and independent medical providers, with a clear stated mission: cut red tape, curb abusive insurance practices, and keep quality care close to home. They represent independent providers, not large health systems or out of state...
The scientific community is one of the few human enterprises that refuses to require a passport. A discovery made in a lab in Copenhagen or Cambridge or Kyoto belongs to anyone with the training to read the paper and the resources to act on it. We celebrate this when...
What We Owe: Medical Debt in America Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. That is a conservative estimate, based on survey data and deliberately excludes the highest outliers to avoid skewing the number upward. The real figure is almost certainly higher. Approximately 14 million people (6%...
I want to start with a number. Just one. Two percent. That is the share of UnitedHealth Group’s total claims volume captured in the federal data that journalists, researchers, and members of Congress have been using to hold the company accountable. Two percent. The other 98%, employer-sponsored plans, Medicaid...
In 1945, the American Medical Association launched what became one of the most expensive lobbying campaigns in American history. Their target was Harry Truman’s proposal for national health insurance. Their weapon was a single, powerful phrase: socialized medicine. The campaign worked. And for the next two decades, the AMA...
Imagine you get a call. The kind that changes the air in the room the moment you hear the doctor’s voice. A diagnosis. Terminal. And in the seconds it takes for that word to settle into your body, a clock you didn’t know existed begins to run. For many...
The United States is the only high-income nation where losing your job can also mean losing your health insurance. That structural quirk was born not of policy design but of wartime accident. It has since become load-bearing infrastructure in our economy. And it is quietly distorting nearly every labor...
In the first issue, I introduced the concept of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) as one of the central reasons Americans pay far more for prescription drugs than patients in any other nation. PBMs are large intermediaries that negotiate rebates from drug makers on behalf of insurers and employers. The...
We pay more for prescription drugs in the United States than any other country in the world, by design.