Treating violence as a health issue seems to work, so why aren’t we embracing this tactic? […]
Christian Pean: Curing the American plague of violence
Category: US healthcare
Anna Lembke: The opioid epidemic is a symptom of our faltering healthcare system
An infusion of money to “fight the epidemic” is going to have little impact […]
Kishore Jayakumar: Is it time to expand immunisation mandates in the US?
Though vaccines are among the most successful public health interventions in history, childhood vaccine refusal among parents is increasingly prevalent in the United States. Vaccine refusal increases the risk of developing a vaccine-preventable disease both for unvaccinated children and fully vaccinated individuals living in the area. According to the 2015 National Immunisation Survey, only 91.9 […]
The collapse of Trumpcare and the rise of single payer
Single payer bills signal a new era in American healthcare politics […]
Diana Zuckerman: How to kill Obamacare—death by 1,000 cuts?
As a presidential candidate and as president of the US, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that “Obamacare is imploding.” For months, the Trump Administration has tried to make that prediction come true. Thanks to the efforts of many healthcare advocates and policymakers, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare, or the ACA) hasn’t imploded. But the Trump […]
William Cayley: Focus on investing in health, not on cost containment
No one wants a bankrupt healthcare system, but we need to care for those who are sick or in need […]
Doctors need to speak up against the use of mental illness as an insult
Arash Javanbakht and Aislinn Williams Over recent months ongoing shakeups in the White House staff have generated a lot of attention from the news media. However, over the summer there was one specific item of news related to psychiatry that got obscured in the whirl of other notable news surrounding it. In July, Ryan Lizza reported that […]
David Hemenway: Why has it been so difficult to change US gun policy?
Polls continually show a majority of Americans support reasonable gun policies, and yet the US has not been able to address its firearms problem […]
Peter Doshi: Speed vs safety in the FDA’s new drug approvals—speed wins, again
In the late 1980s, AIDS activists stormed the headquarters of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with a message that the FDA’s drug approval process was, simply put, killing people by blocking the approval of new treatments. One protester’s shirt read: “If I die of AIDS—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of […]
Joel Lexchin: We’ve missed an opportunity to debate FDA funding and user fees
In mid-August 2017, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, signed the FDA Reauthorization Act 2017, under which drug and device makers pay the FDA a fee for every new product application. User fees have been a significant component of FDA funding since the passage of the Prescription Drug User Fees Act in 1992. […]