by Laura Turner
SDN Staff Writer
U.S. health care reform is shaping up to be a key activity for lawmakers in 2009. The Obama administration is mobilizing its volunteer base from the campaign to lobby Congress for change. Politicians on both sides of the spectrum are putting forth their vision for the future of medicine.
In order to provide our membership of future health care providers with the latest reform ideas, the Student Doctor Network will be publishing a series of articles on health care policy. These articles will include interviews from policy makers and details on technical and structural innovations aimed at reducing costs and improving outcomes.
Previously, SDN interviewed Dr. John Geyman, author of Do Not Resuscitate, who espoused a need for a single payer nationalized health care system.
Additional articles in the series, to be published in the coming months, will include the following:
- Interview with Dr. David Sundwall, who served as President Reagan’s Director of the Health Resources and Services Administration at the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services
- The role of health information exchanges in improving health care delivery
We invite our membership to submit ideas for other articles in this area. Please provide your comments below.
This series sounds much needed and is–by me at least–a much appreciated addition to Student Doctor Network.
My only request/suggestion is to keep in mind that this website enlightens topics in medicine and medical training via the perspective of health care providers and health care providers in training. In that light, I think, the series should be as removed from politics and ideology as possible. In other words, if articles (or interviews, for instance) become too closely guided by the author’s (or interviewers) political opinions, the series would loose the unique appeal of the website’s aforementioned perspective.
An article dedicated to basic economic principles of supply and demand in healthcare, the need for balance billing, the problem of price fixation by the government, and the fiscal insolvency of Medicare would be appropriate for a health policy article.