Why can't the United States have a smarter health care system?

That was the frustrating question that kept poking through my train of thought as I read a study from the most recent issue of Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The

Healthcare reform is a complicated subject to tackle, and unfortunately too many of our politicos and pundits hold on to their jobs by making us believe that we are a house divided: people who hate the poor vs. people who hate freedom. But we know these are false divisions. Health...

Nestled in the emerging Affordable Care Act is a groundbreaking provision that will require pharmaceutical companies and other medical industries to report all direct payments or gifts over $10 that are made to physicians. It's called the Sunshine Provision, and will take effect in January of 2012.

Physicians...

I spent my formative years as a pediatrician in the U.S. Navy, and so it happened that I was a seasoned pediatrician of nearly 10 years before I had my first experience with Medicaid. I left the Navy for civilian practice in 1990. Moving from the military system of universal...

I usually write about health care reform from a pediatrician's viewpoint, but what grabbed my attention recently was a story my husband, Randy, told me about an adult in his practice -- a patient on Medicaid.

Randy is a neurologist in a private practice and Medicaid patients come from...

Recent attempts to fundamentally alter Medicare -- and the public outcry that followed -- provide a working template for how to view broader health care reform. Everyone agrees that our healthcare system -- and Medicare in particular -- is financially unsustainable. Any step we take to address this requires a...

One year after passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the debate roars on, in Congress and everywhere else. And these debates often revolve around a big question, even when it is left unspoken or implied: Is health care a basic human right?

In 1990 I made a...

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a study of prescription patterns in 2009, conducted by IMS Health, showed that 25 percent of children in the U.S. were on regular medication.

IMS Health is a firm that provides marketing intelligence to pharmaceutical companies. The firm's job is to keep the...

I used to practice pediatrics. It has been several years since I decided to leave medicine, but people still ask me about it, and I find myself offering neat explanations between gulps of coffee. Of course, the full truth is much more complicated. The full truth has as much to...

The midterm elections have come and gone, and there soon will be a lot of new voices reverberating through the halls of the Capitol -- which has to be great news for health care reformists. Who better to find a saner and fiscally more responsible way to deliver health care...

In the wake of this midterm election season, with all its dramatic and rhetorical pledges to America, we should not lose sight of the pledges we have already made. We have promised as a nation to provide our disabled veterans with the best health services that modern medicine has to...