We have a guest blogger today: Dan Lee, former Riverside Press-Enterprise reporter and current student at the Annenberg School for Communication, is working for the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships and ReportingonHealth.
By Daniel Lee
Reporters covering the health care reform debate have failed to adequately investigate the claims made by both Democratic and Republican leaders and could do more to focus on its local impacts, experts said Wednesday.
If Congress and President Barack Obama decide the responsibility for health insurance falls on the shoulders of individual Americans, all of us might want to pay more attention to what's going on now in the individual insurance market and to what's promised in the legislation. If having no insurance is considered rock-bottom, having individual insurance is the next floor up. Some call it "house insurance," thinking that by having it they won't lose their homes to pay for a catastrophic illness.
This is a post I wrote about Muriel Gillick's book, The Denial of Aging, when the health care reform debate was just getting going.
This piece looked at Paul Starr's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the social transformation of American medicine and explored how the issues he discusses can shed light on the current vituperative health care reform debate.
We continue our 5-part series on the high cost of health care in America.
2007 Fellow Daisy Lin's big picture look at health care crisis in an election year was nominated for a Los Angeles Emmy.
Every few decades, a flu pandemic spreads westward from Asia. The last one, in 1968, was relatively mild - and we have yet to see the full damage caused by the swine flu outbreak. But the next pandemic is inevitable - and it’s likely to come from China.
President Barack Obama is searching for a new surgeon general. He might consider screening the resumes of doctors a little lower in the federal ranks.
Update: Dr. Gupta removed himself from the list of candidates on March 5, telling CNN's Larry King, "I think for me it really came down to a sense of timing more than anything else. This job...takes us away from our children for so many years at once, and I sort of came to grips that I'd probably be away for several years of their lives."
Dr. Sanjay Gupta appears to be the first surgeon general picked not for his public service but for his public image.