Tag Archives: health insurance

Millennials may be changing healthcare (ft. Martin Makary, MD)

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Continuing our recent discussion on the price of healthcare in the United States, on this episode we talk with Dr. Martin Makary.  Dr. Makary is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, a best-selling author, and a health policy expert. Dr. Makary’s latest book entitled The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care–and How to Fix It, is due out in September.  We were so glad to talk with him, because it’s all-too-easy to be jaded about the ‘business’ of healthcare when one in five Americans are in collections over healthcare debt.  But Dr. Makary combines outrage at the market forces that have created a used-car-lot sales environment with optimism about healthcare’s future prospects for transparency and fairness.  Things are changing, he says!  Interestingly, the medical students doing research with him–pouring their hearts, souls, and minds into it–have helped to create that sense of optimism in him.  In other words, millennials may be saving American healthcare even as they’re killing the napkin and real estate industries.

On top of all that, while The Price We Pay is an indictment of the insurance and billing practices that hinder the work of doctors and the healing of patients, the book is also a guidebook to the things that can and are being done to restore medicine’s mission.


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I’m looking at you, millennials: what do you think? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Do all three!

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The Darkness Without: SAD in Med School

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Madeline called to ask: it’s finals week and you’re stricken with seasonal depression–what’s a med student to do?  We feel you, Madeline.  Luckily, Aline Sandouk, Nick Lind, Derek Bradley, and Hillary O’Brien are ready to throw open the curtains on their ideas to help.  And Jeannet-tello hit us up on our Instagram to find out what she should do about impostor syndrome.

Plus, Dave shares the recent video that UIHC Marketing and Communications unwisely allowed him to be in.

 

This Week in Medical News

Healthcare providers, if you want to take the Surgeon General’s advice and save people from dying of opioid overdoses, you might kiss your ability to get health insurance goodbye.  And a Tennessee physician starts off his new job as a US Representative by promising–for no reason at all–to dig up the dirt the CDC has been hiding about vaccines and autism.  Thank goodness, we’re all saved.

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Are you nervous about starting med school? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Share your fears!

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Tales from the Clinic: from Theory to Practice

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There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

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Photo by amountaineer

Kylie Miller and Issac Schwantes take a break from their fairly new clinical duties to let Gabe Conley and Erik Kneller know how it’s going working with actual patients.  What unexpected things have they learned?  Were their professors really correct when the said that arcane bit of information would actually be useful in the real world?  Were their fears (whatever they were) realized?  Would they rather grandma puke every time they broke wind, or have a shingles outbreak whenever they get a passing grade or better in medical school?  Dave assures them: these are the questions listeners want answers to.

This Week in Medical News

The nation’s largest health insurer, Aetna, wants patients to diagnose themselves and risk huge ER bills if they get it wrong.  We recap the work of our own Sarah Ziegenhorn and her non-profit Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition, which is on the forefront of needle exchange efforts in Iowa.  The DEA is relaxing rules that prevented many healthcare workers from prescribing treatment to opioid addiction sufferers.  And we look at the tiny, cute robots that may one day crawl, tumble, and wiggle around your insides like an over-active inchworm.

We Want to Hear From You

What are your fears for starting the next phase of your education?  Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Tales from the Clinic: from Theory to Practice