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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