My friend and colleague, Dr. Jack Ostrich, who always gives us an enlightening Christmas Story gave us this one. The ICD 9 would have several codes for different types of fracture, for instance, now the ICD 10 has dozens of codes to identify minor differences and what is the type of visit for each type […]

Reviewed by Michael Norris, MD, President I recently re-read The House of God, a satirical novel published in 1978. It details the intern experience of a young doctor at the House of God, patterned after Boston’s Beth Israel Hos­pital. The author is Samuel Shem, pen-name of psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Bergman. Like the novel’s protagonist, Roy […]

Dr. Rosen:       Here we are half way through the presidential primaries like we’ve never seen before.  Have we lost our civility? Is the Republican Party in the early stages of self-destruction? The Republican Party is the third oldest political party in the world formed in the 1850s and sometimes called the party of Lincoln (the […]

Dr. Rosen:       The ICD 10 has arrived. So long to ICD 9, our Classification of Diseases for the past 50-years. What does this transition mean? Dr. Edwards:    It undoubtedly will take longer to code every patient. This is adding time to see each patient. Dr. Milton:       In the real world time is money. In the […]

“Spiritual But Not Religious” is a phrase you hear more and more these days — and with good reason. In 2012, a Pew Foundation survey on religion found that almost 20 percent of Americans placed themselves in the category of “unaffiliated.” That 20 percent unaffiliated translates into a whole lot of people. It’s a big […]

We have been using ICD 9, the ninth edition of the International Classification of Diseases for the last 40 or 50 years. Each disease is classified into one of 16,000 identity classes so that doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacies are also speaking of the same identical disease. This was a logical and appropriate classification to […]

Of the 28 OECD countries that share Canada’s goal of providing care on the basis of need and not ability to pay, 23 have some form of cost sharing program for patients covering hospital and physician services, and in many cases emergency room visits. All of these countries have realized what economic experiments and international […]

Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money? Lawrence Wittner | Updated Sep 20, 2014 Professor of History emeritus, SUNY Albany Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators — unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt) — are […]

Hillsdale College was founded in 1844 by men and women who proclaimed themselves “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land,” and who believed that “the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.” Hillsdale was the […]

A disturbing report from the front lines of the war on cancer By Malcolm Gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/14/tough-medicine In the fall of 1963, not long after Vincent T. DeVita, Jr., joined the National Cancer Institute as a clinical associate, he and his wife were invited to a co-worker’s party. At the door, one of the institute’s most […]