Pharma's Dark Money: Touting Corporate Responsibility and Non-Partisanship, But Using Dark Money to Promote Self-Serving Policies and Partisan Causes

Health Care Corporations Promote Their Social Responsibility

The US health care system's extreme dsyfnctionality is now a cliche.  So it's no wonder that everyone seems to want to make things better.  Big health care corporations in particular tout their socially responsible ideas for health care reform.

For example, PhRMA, the trade organization for drug and biotechnology firms, describes its

The Mystery of the Ownership of the Trinity School of Medicine

Trinity School of Medicine Vice President Boasts that It Is "Not the Same" As Most Offshore Medical Schools

A post promoting the Trinity School of Medicine just appeared on the KevinMD blog. It was entitled "Addressing the 'ugly truth' about Caribbean medical schools: Why they’re not all the same." Its purpose seemed to be to persuade the reader in particular that the Trinity School of

Remembering Dr Bernard Carroll

Dr Bernard Carroll passed away on September 10, 2018.  Dr Carroll had a distinguished career, so it was a surprise and delight that he also chose to be a stalwart Health Care Renewal blogger.  He was with us since 2005, contributing insightful, pithy, provocative and important posts.  He also authored some of our most widely read posts.  Most viewed was: JAMA Jumps the Shark.   His most

Fake Reform Foisted on Us by Those who Benefit Most from the Current Dysfunction

Introduction - No Funding for You

To better understand health care dysfunction, I interviewed doctors and health
professionals, and published the results in Poses RM.   A cautionary
tale: the dysfunction of American health care.  Eur J Int Med 2003; 14(2): 123-130. (link here). 
In that article, I postulated that US physicians were demoralized
because their core values were under threat,

Michael Fine's Health Care Revolt

Michael Fine, M.D., HealthCare Revolt: How to Organize, Build a Health Care System, and Resuscitate Democracy – All at the Same Time (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018).



Dr. Michael Fine is a man on fire. He’s on fire with anger
about a healthcare marketplace that serves well to maximize the profits of
investors and CEOs, but violates the values of many of those working in it.
He’s on fire with

Apologizing for Problems with Commenting

My apologies!

I discovered a few days ago that our Google overlords had stopped notifying me about pending comments some months ago.  No indicator of the number of pending comments appears on my Blogger dashboard. 

I just realized I had a large backlog of pending comments, most of which were spam, but some of which were not.  I just posted all those that were not obvious spam.  I am now

EHR evidentiary mayhem

A short post.

I am encountering, in my legal work, electronic medical records
systems that either allow ex post facto note alterations by clinicians -
for example, after a catastrophe - and/or alteration of the apparent
date/time a note was entered. The alterations (e.g., a version history) or fake times don't
appear on the printed records, and usually are not in the audit trails as well.