The Ultimate Conflict of Interest: Trump Organization Revenue vs Lives Lost to Coronavirus

Introduction: Conflicts of Interest and the Trump Administration

We have been discussing the pervasiveness of conflicts of interest in health care for years.  Recently,  we have worried how conflicts of interest and corruption in health care could be combated under an administration with such severe conflicts of interest and corruption at the highest levels, most recently here.

President Trump

COVID-19: Could We Have Been More Ready?

We now see reports of how the US is short of either masks, gowns, doctors, hospital beds, ventilators, community health workers, tests, treatments, or some combination thereof, to manage the new COVID pandemic and the annual influenza season.  We see Congress hustling to adopt a funding package to catch up with the gaps.

I just saw, as an attending physician on a busy urban internal medicine

Guest Post: Coronavirus and the Finger of G-d

Health Care Renewal presents a guest post from Dr Michael Fine, a
writer, community organizer, and family physician. He is the chief
health strategist for the City of Central Falls, RI, and Senior Clinical
and Population Health Services Officer for Blackstone Valley Community
Health Care, Inc., and recipient of the Barbara Starfield Award, the
John Cunningham Award, and the Austin T. Levy

The Mother of All Mission-Hostile Management: During the Coronavirus Pandemic Trump Shows He is the Enemy of the Public's Health

Introduction: Health Care Dysfunction

We have been talking about health care dysfunction for a very long time, starting with a publication in 2003: 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, and

How Threats to Health Care Professionals' Core Values Lead to Moral Injury

Introduction: Threats to Core Values

In the late 1990s, my colleagues and I started noting a rising tide of what we then called physician dissatisfaction.  One small clue was that physicians I met at meetings seemed to be responding to polite questions about their well-being with less enthusiastic responses.  In the early 2000s, publications begin appearing about health care professionals'

The Virus This Time: Ill-Informed, Incompetent Leadership Enabling Suppression of Free Speech, Intimidation of Whistleblowers, Propaganda and Disinformation

Unfortunately, the rapid progression of coronavirus is providing a demonstration of the dysfunction, and worse, that can be produced by bad leadership in health care and public health.

Ill-Informed Leadership

During the Trump regime we began to find striking examples of top government officials expressing ill-informed,
if not outright ignorant opinions about medical, health care and public

Rising Tide of Disinformation about Coronavirus: the Roles of Ideologues, Quacks, Russians, and US Politicians

Introduction: Propaganda and Disinformation in Health Care

We used to write about propaganda and disinformation used to promote health care goods and services (stealth marketing
campaigns), and advocate for policies favorable to private health care
organizations (stealth health policy advocacy and stealth lobbying).  Some stealth marketing, lobbying and
policy advocacy campaigns encompass not

What the Heck Happened to Surprise Billing Legislation? (Or, it’s never too late for the lobbyists to win.)

With constituents pressing for something to remedy unexpected liabilities incurred from “surprise” medical bills, it was expected that surprise medical bill legislation would pass federally in December 2019 as part of an end-of-year legislation package. House and Senate committees had worked for months on consensus legislation that was ready to go, but that fell through at the last moment. What

The Big Spin Out: 2020 Revolving Door Update

In  2020, cases of the revolving door accumulated quickly. 





The Old School Outgoing Revolving Door

Let us begin with cases of the old fashioned outgoing revolving door, that is, of
people leaving leadership positions in governmental bodies which
regulate health care or make health care policy, then soon obtaining
jobs
in the health care industry, particularly organizations which they

Cybernetic Opioid Pushers: EHR vendor Practice Fusion to Pay $145 Million to Resolve Criminal and Civil Investigations

Considering the devastating and deadly opioid problems in this country, this news release from DOJ describes particularly despicable behavior from an EHR vendor and pharmas.




These problems are likely more widespread, but this EHR company got caught.

The company admitted that it
solicited and received kickbacks from a major opioid company in exchange
for utilizing its EHR software to

Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index 2019: Political Corruption in the US Worsens, and Results are Largely Anechoic

Transparency International has just released its 2019 version of the Corruption Perceptions Index.  This version emphasized public sector corruption.  Once again, it appears the US has a worsening corruption problem.  Once again, the results are largely anechoic.

Summary of the 2019 CPI

Methods

Per the TI summary


The CPI scores 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of

Who Owns, and Who is Accountable for the New US For-Profit Medical Schools?

Mysteries still abound in the not so wonderful world of health care dysfunction, so once again, quick, the game's afoot...

The current mysteries involve beneficial ownership.  Beneficial ownership
questions are important to anti-corruption campaigners.  Beneficial
ownership simply refers to "anyone who enjoys the benefits of ownership
of a security or property, without being on the

The Risks of Attending an Offshore Medical School: Students at Offshore Medical Schools Killed or Injured by Gas Explosions

US and Canadian medical education has a peculiar gray zone.  A substantial proportion of US and at least some Canadian doctors have received their medical degrees from offshore medical schools.  These are medical schools located in other countries, mainly the Caribbean, that exist only to train students for North American practice.  They are often owned by for-profit US or Canadian based