When Your Therapist Is Only a Click Away
By JAN HOFFMAN
THE event reminder on Melissa Weinblatt’s iPhone buzzed: 15 minutes till her shrink appointment.
She mixed herself a mojito, added a sprig of mint, put on her sunglasses and headed outside to her friend’s pool. Settling into a lounge chair, she tapped the Skype app on her phone. Hundreds of miles away, her face popped up on her therapist’s computer monitor; he smiled back on her phone’s screen.
She took a sip of her cocktail. The session began.
Deep health care divide in Rick Perry’s Texas - Nation - The Boston Globe
HOUSTON - The cutting edge treatments and renowned doctors here at the Texas Medical Center draw Arab sheiks and former first ladies to gleaming facilities adorned with spraying fountains and aquariums. Billed as the world’s largest medical campus, the towering glass and sandstone buildings house 14 hospitals and three medical schools, spread across 14 square blocks.http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2011/09/24/deep-health-care-divide-rick-perry-texas/oFxOgwEvVMmxGm46c9GQnN/story.xml
Toughest health care job in Mass. - Business - The Boston Globe
Kate Walsh has worked for the region’s dominant health care system and for a leading global drug maker. But her education on urban health issues - and the challenge of leading the state’s largest safety net hospital in a sluggish economy - began just 18 months ago when she took over as chief executive of Boston Medical Center.The vast majority of the hospital’s patients come from low-income families. Many are elderly, disabled, or recent immigrants struggling with their English. Most get health insurance from the state or federal governments. Some have difficulty getting to the South End hospital from homes and jobs in far-flung neighborhoods.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2011/09/24/medical-makeover/6EwUumD0xPkMQ47KBVKQfN/story.xml
How One Small Group Sets Doctors’ Pay
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.Despite decades of warnings of a primary care crisis and the fact that some 60 million patients are without primary care doctors, the medical profession has continued to produce legions of specialists.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/how-one-small-group-sets-doctors-pay/?pagemode=print
When asked, most of my colleagues will point to the system that determines how medical charges are reimbursed by insurance, and how doctors in different areas of medicine are paid.
Cancer cost 'crisis' warning from oncologists
The cost of treating cancer in the developed world is spiralling and is "heading towards a crisis", an international team of researchers says.
Their Lancet Oncology report says there is a "culture of excess" with insufficient evidence about the "value" of new treatments and technologies.
It says the number of cancer patients and the cost of treating each one is increasing.
Bartering For Health Care: Yardwork For Treatment
Deb Barth is raking leaves for Lesley Jones. But Barth isn't earning money for her yardwork, at least not in physical currency. She's earning "time dollars" — for every two hours she spends doing odd jobs, she'll earn a free visit with her doctor.
As a struggling artist, Barth's income qualifies her for the program at True North, a nonprofit health care clinic in Falmouth, Maine. She's one of 33 patients who pay with time dollars there.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140737591/bartering-for-health-care-yardwork-for-treatment?ft=1&f=1001
Who knows your body best?
How Do You Say ‘Economic Security’?
By THEODORE R. MARMOR and JERRY L. MASHAW
IN the face of nothing but bad economic news, Americans often take heart in remembering that we have been here before — during the Great Depression, when conditions were far worse than they are today — and we survived.
But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.
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