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“Viewpoints” | Of Carrot Cake and Oreos

By: Joanne Kenen

Dr. David Kessler, as you've probably heard, is out with a terrific best-seller called The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. The cover grabs your attention: very pure white glossy background with a carrot cake and carrots. I don't like carrot cake. But as I told Dr. Kessler, if the cover picture were an Oreo, I wouldn't be able to have his book in my house. I got to know Kessler while I was covering tobacco back in the late 1990s, but hadn't seen him in quite a few ...

“Viewpoints” | How Health Reform Can Improve End-of-Life Care

By: Sydney Dy

Health care reform offers significant opportunities not only to improve the quality of end-of-life care, but to apply the principles of good end-of-life care to improving our health care system. Since an estimated 25 percent of Medicare dollars are spent in the last year of life — and much of this spending is not on symptom management, communication, or caregiving but on procedures and treatments unlikely to be beneficial — health care reform cannot be effective unless it specifically addresses issues around serious and terminal illness. Unfortunately, quality end-of-life care is ...

“Viewpoints” | Immigrants and Health Care – The Real Numbers and Policy Implications

By: Marc Rosenblum

As the House and Senate move toward the final outlines of health care reform legislation, they confront important questions about how proposals might apply to immigrants. There is consensus that unauthorized immigrants be excluded from the benefits of health reform, but lawmakers face two other critical decisions regarding immigrants: whether recent legal immigrants should be eligible for Medicaid and/or subsidies, and how to verify that unauthorized immigrants cannot access the new programs. The most important eligibility question concerns recent legal immigrants (lawful permanent residents, or LPRs) who have had their visas ...

“Viewpoints” | The Challenge of Modern Health Information Privacy Laws

By: James Hodge

Alex Berenson in the New York Times recently wrote, “The most precious commodity on Wall Street is information...” (1) A similar observation may hold true concerning health data in the modern contexts of health care practice, delivery, reimbursement, and research. Within an emerging national electronic health information infrastructure, personally identifiable health data are an essential commodity, exchanged routinely among providers, insurers, data clearinghouses, researchers, governmental agencies, employers, and others. Access to identifiable health data among multiple groups continues to grow exponentially as digital personal health records (PHRs) become pervasive. Ongoing ...