HEALTHY ONLINE

A new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The study is titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”, and it analyzes an experiment on Facebook users conducted by Facebook, in collaboration with researchers from UCSF and Cornell, almost two years ago. The experiment was a success, as it showed that Facebook was able to alter the emotional state of its users by making subtle and deliberate changes to the content users were shown in their news feeds. The study was subsequently edited for publishing by a Princeton professor, and accepted for publication by the prestigious National Academies , which by the way include the Institute of Medicine (IOM). The experiment “manipulated” the News Feeds of 689,003 people, randomly selected, and then measured the effect on the subjects’ own Facebook postings, due to increased exposure to either positive or negative content fr...

The Commonwealth Fund just published its fourth Mirror, Mirror on the Wall study comparing the U.S. health care system with other countries, and as in all previous studies, we ranked as the absolutely worst health care system in the developed world, bar none. Yikes. The Commonwealth Fund studied many health care domains, and we didn’t rank in first place for anything. The best we managed to do is place a lackluster third in the subcategory of Effective Care. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, with its socialized medicine system, took first place in almost every category, and the Swiss came in second.  That’s almost enough to drive a proud American into deep despair, and as the report bluntly states, “The claim that the United States has “the best health care system in the world” is clearly not true”. To add insult to injury, ours is also clearly the most expensive system in the world, and no, that doesn’t count as being #1 for something. The authors of the Commonwealth Fund re...

There are over 16,000,000 American children (21.8%) who live in official poverty and double that number who are just poor. This is not happening in an obscure country, in a continent far away. It is happening right here, across the street from you. For those enjoying a good episode of Duck Dynasty, these are not children of illegal immigrants, and the vast majority is white kids. Over 44,000,000 American children (more than 1 in 3) were served by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 2012. You can look at these numbers and be proud that we are helping more kids get proper health care, and you can listen carefully and hear the underlying narrative of an America raising its future self in abject poverty. Redirecting your gaze to our health care reforms, you should now understand that American health care is being transformed precisely to service this impoverished future. We are now building a health care system for the poor, the jobless, the uneducated, the hu...

Stifling innovation is a very bad thing. As a society it is incumbent upon us to let innovation breath free, prosper and multiply, because innovation is good for us. All innovation is good for us, even if it doesn’t look that way initially, because you never know when a seemingly useless innovation will spawn that one innovation that will save the world. Hence, we should not try to look innovation in the mouth and we should not attempt to discriminate between innovations that seem worthy and those that look and sound like snake oil of days gone by, or much worse. We should just lay back and let ourselves be immersed in the fragrant, colorful and relaxing innovation bubble bath. Health care innovation comes in three basic flavors, scientific discovery, technology utilization and operational model. What distinguishes enlightened societies from those left behind is the ability to harmonize all three domains of innovation to benefit individuals and as a result society as a whole. Health ca...