The US has the worst healthcare system among all industrialized nations. Life expectancy in the USis lower, especially when it comes to maternal and child mortality. On average, Canadians livethree years longer than we do. These outcomes are not from a lack of money. We spend twice as onhealthcare as the next highest paying country. The amount of federal tax dollars spent per capita onhealthcare alone is more than Canada or any other country spends. There are many ways of lowering our healthcare costs, such as universalizing our healthcaresystem, regulating healthcare …

September starts the open enrollment period for seniors choosing a healthcare plan, either traditional Medicare (TM) or any one of a number of commercial “Medicare Advantage” plans (MA). Picking the one plan that is right for you depends upon your overall health status, your financial situation, and your ability to predict your health in the future. For the next 3 or 4 months, you’re going to be flooded with advertisements for various MA plans, pitched by older celebrities like Joe Namath, Jimmy “Dy-no-mite” Walker, and William Shatner. You’ll hear them …

America has both a gun violence problem and a mental health crisis, but the two should be viewed and treated separately. We can all agree that anyone who kills themselves or another human being is “not in their right mind,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have a mental health disorder or one that can be detected before they act. The gunmen behind the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings had much in common, but neither had a diagnosed mental health disorder. Besides, even if they did, many states do not have …

In a recent op-ed by State Senator Rosenwald, she cites “a recent study from Harvard Medical School shows Medicare Advantage to be a critical tool to improve access to affordable healthcare for our most vulnerable patient populations.”The study did have input from Harvard University, but it focused solely on the demographics of who was signing up for Medicare Advantage plans without comparing the plans themselves. While Harvard was listed first in the name of the report, this was not a Harvard-based study. The principal author of the report was Scott …