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The truth about Medicare Advantage funding and costs

Timothy Bulat

Policy

March 26, 2026

For more than two decades, I have worked in health insurance, first at insurers and more recently as a consultant on Medicare policy. I have led large Medicare Advantage analytics and actuarial organizations comprising actuaries and data scientists working to improve care delivery, manage costs, and optimize revenue. Having seen firsthand the sophistication insurers bring both to improving care and to maximizing revenue within the rules, I find today’s MA …

Why symptom variability in chronic illness is not failure

Donald Kushner, MD

Physician

March 26, 2026

Every clinician has encountered this moment. A patient leans forward and says, “But doctor, I was fine yesterday.” The statement carries confusion, frustration, and sometimes quiet alarm. It also reveals an assumption deeply embedded in both medical culture and human cognition, that stability should look like consistency.

In clinical medicine, predictability is often mistaken for stability. We feel reassured when symptoms follow familiar patterns. Patients feel encouraged when treatments produce repeatable …

Why your patient’s disability claim was denied

Jennifer Hess, JD

Conditions

March 26, 2026

Sooner or later, most physicians encounter this moment. A patient arrives at an appointment carrying a thick envelope of disability insurance forms. They look uncomfortable when they ask the question.

“Can you help me fill these out?”

For many clinicians, the request lands at the worst possible time. The waiting room is full. The schedule is already behind. And the forms themselves are long, repetitive, and often confusing. Still, you try to …

How ChatGPT Health exposes the flaws in modern primary care

David Carmouche, MD

Tech

March 26, 2026

OpenAI’s announcement of ChatGPT Health landed with predictable shock across health care. A consumer platform with hundreds of millions of users can now securely ingest medical records, wearable data, and personal health history to deliver context-aware guidance in real time. For many health executives, the instinctive response was alarm, but that reaction misses the point.

This announcement was not a disruption; it was a revelation. When OpenAI reports that 230 million …

Pediatric home health care oversight: Why accountability is failing

Ashley Youngdale

Conditions

March 26, 2026

When my medically complex son Declan came home from the hospital, he needed round-the-clock care, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A full-time worker puts in about 1,960 hours a year, assuming 40 hours a week minus vacation and holidays. Each year has 8,760 hours. That means caring for Declan required an equivalent of 4.47 full-time employees every year.

In Minnesota, where we live, for even the highest-acuity cases, …

Proactive monitoring can prevent emergencies by catching heart signals early [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

March 25, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Health care executive Chris Darland discusses their article “Why remote patient monitoring needs a preventive shift.” Chris explains that remote patient monitoring is currently too reactive, functioning as a safety net that …

Health care affordability crisis: lessons from the NYC nursing strike

Marc Henry Estriplet, MD, MPH

Physician

March 25, 2026

As a physician who lives and has practiced in NYC, the largest nursing strike in the city’s history has broken my heart. It has saddened me that our nurses could not be the heroes they truly are and that hospitalized patients experiencing some of the worst days of their lives had not received the best quality care that they could and should get.

And this is just the start of a …

How wearable technology is changing the role of physicians

Jeffrey Junig, MD, PhD

Tech

March 25, 2026

At a recent CES show, a “longevity mirror” was introduced that can estimate your health from a brief facial scan and assign you a score. No clinician. No exam. Just a number. It is an impressive piece of technology. It is also a useful place to start, because it captures something that is quietly changing in medicine. Patients no longer need us to begin the process.

We are now surrounded by …

Workplace violence against nurses: a crisis of systemic failure

Amanda Dean, RN

Conditions

March 25, 2026

I walked onto my small unit a few minutes before 7 a.m., nurses huddled around one elderly gentleman. A cacophony of alarm bells and call lights went unanswered as the unit’s three overnight staff members attempted to keep him in bed. He voiced his disagreement loudly while climbing over the rails meant to protect his safety. Though he was strong, he was unsteady. Exasperated, the night nurse showed me her …

Ignored DNR hospital policy: a family’s tragic end-of-life story

Amanda Cutshall

Conditions

March 25, 2026

On the morning of May 19, 2024, my 74-year-old mother was struggling to breathe at her home in Bastrop, Texas. I called 911, an ambulance arrived, and my mother was transported to a hospital.

What followed was a devastating series of miscommunications and ignored directives that led to unnecessary suffering for her and profound trauma for our family.

A clear directive

My mother’s end-of-life wishes had been clear for a long time: She …

Why measuring muscle mass matters more than tracking your weight [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

March 24, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Physical therapist and certified lymphedema specialist Maureen McBeth discusses her article “Beyond BMI: Why weight management must look inside the body.” Maureen explains why common tools like the bathroom scale and body …

Health insurance incentives and alternatives to opioids for chronic pain

Molly Candon, PhD and Daniel Clauw, MD

Conditions

March 24, 2026

The opioid crisis rages on, and there is plenty of blame to go around: pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors, reckless prescribers, the FDA. One entity that has been overlooked is health insurance, whose incentives pushed chronic pain patients to take opioids in the first place.

Check out your insurance plan and the copays you pay for different services. In one of ours, a generic medication costs $10 a month, at most. Physical …

Independent medical practice: Why private clinics are essential

Marcelo Hochman, MD

Physician

March 24, 2026

Independent medicine is often described as nostalgic, a relic of a prior era in which physicians owned small practices and made decisions without corporate oversight. But independence is not nostalgia; it is infrastructure.

Today, nearly 75 percent of physicians in the United States are employed by hospitals, health systems, or corporate entities, according to the American Medical Association. In 2012, that number was closer to 50 percent. Private equity investment in …

How hindsight bias distorts clinical medicine

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

March 24, 2026

Hindsight flatters certainty. Clinical medicine does not. After a bad outcome, everyone becomes smarter. The diagnosis looks obvious. The warning signs seem bright. The missed clue appears unforgivable. In the calm of retrospective review, people ask, “How could the doctor not have seen it?” That question sounds fair. Often, it is not. Real-world medicine does not happen in hindsight. It happens in the presence of noise, time pressure, incomplete information, …

Do no harm: Why physician burnout requires bottom-up reform

Desiree Francis, MD

Physician

March 24, 2026

Before there were health care systems, insurance companies, or electronic medical records, there was the healer, a person embedded within the community, accountable not only for technical competence but for character.

My medical training outside the United States, while competitive and rigorous, remained service-oriented and community-based. Medicine historically was grounded in cultivated human qualities: humility, accountability, reverence for life, respect, and relational presence. Healing was not limited to scheduled interventions; it …

Institutional distrust in health care: Why a doctor lost faith

Joshua Mirrer, MD

Physician

March 24, 2026

Faith implies trust: confidence in an idea, a system, or a set of principles. In religion, it often requires adherence to divine authority, shaped by interpretation and tradition. Over time, those traditions can harden into dogma, discouraging curiosity and resisting ideas that challenge the prevailing worldview. This is not unique to religion. Any system that depends on belief risks the same fate.

When contradictions within a belief system become impossible to …

Communicating health to children: a pediatrician’s guide for parents

Joey Skelton, MD

Conditions

March 24, 2026

An excerpt from Your Child Is Not Their Weight: Parenting in a Size-Obsessed World, with permission from the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2026.

A friend and colleague who is a doctor in adult medicine made this comment to me several years ago: “My patients with kids have a harder time with their health than those who do not have kids!”

I pointed out to her that the “patients with kids” she …

Insulin resistance is a survival mechanism, not a broken system [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

March 23, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Metabolic health educator Kevin Whitt discusses his article “Insulin resistance is not a disease: a metabolic reframe.” Kevin argues that the skyrocketing rates of Type 2 diabetes are not the result of …

Debunking 4 myths about fertility treatments for women of color

Ilana Ressler, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

Regina Townsend, founder of The Broken Brown Egg, writes that “trying to decide if you can emotionally afford the cost of building a Black or Brown family in a world that is concurrently showing you how low they are valued adds additional weight to an already heavy situation.”

Townsend emphasizes the importance of recognizing the lived experiences of women of color: “Infertility doesn’t see color, but my color …

Whole-body MRI screening: a radiologist’s guide to preventive scans

Amit Newatia, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

Last year, a 45-year-old woman walked into my screening center in Laurel, MD. She was fit, healthy, and had no symptoms whatsoever. She just wanted peace of mind, the kind of baseline health data that her annual physical could not provide. Ninety minutes later, her whole-body MRI revealed a kidney tumor she did not know existed. No pain. No blood in her urine. Nothing to suggest she was harboring a …

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