Marcia Angell

Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn., whom The New York Times has taken to calling Dr. Frist), the Senate majority leader and President Bush’s new fair-haired boy, wants to fix Medicare. This is the same Bill Frist whose father founded a for-profit hospital chain, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). Headed by Frist’s brother, HCA merged with another […]

On his article on PubMed Central, the NIH’s new electronic archive of biomedical research, Harvey Blume paints critics like me as quixotically trying to hold back the Internet (he refers to the controversy as “a tale of new technology versus old, of innovation and inertia”). In fact, my arguments against PubMed Central have nothing to […]

As air leaks out of the economic balloon, the number of Americans withouthealth insurance will rise. For two decades, the number–now more than 45million–has been steadily growing, as it has during all but the last of oureight years of unprecedented prosperity. There are only two large payers forhealth insurance: government and private employers. Both have […]

H ealth care is back on the political front burner. Not that anyone is talking about a major overhaul, like the ill-fated Clinton plan that banished the issue from polite political discourse for nearly six years. Instead, both George W. Bush and Al Gore are targeting isolated pieces of the health care system: prescription drug […]