Why Everyone Should Experience the Holocaust Exhibition

January 07, 11

First published in the Florida Times Union

An extraordinary traveling exhibition and lecture series from the US Holocaust Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, is in my community now. The presentations describes the events leading up to the arrest of Jews and other minorities in Nazi Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and then the depraved acts – medical experiments and genocide – that were carried out in the name of “cleansing.” There can be a tendency among Jews, like me, to focus on our own victimization, but there is a larger message and opportunity here.

It would be a mistake to think that this exhibition is only about Jews or Germans. Rather, it is about a deep sickness that all societies – even the most enlightened – can fall prey to. In recent years alone, we’ve seen horrific mass murders in Nigeria, Bosnia, Cambodia, Uganda, Armenia, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo and throughout South America, always as more stable nations stood by and watched.

There are patterns that typically occur before and after these disasters. The persecuting groups organize in ways that make them more powerful and effective. They portray the people they hate as threats, inferior, less worthy, unfeeling and sub-human. As atrocities become known, they orchestrate messages that deny any wrongdoing and deflect blame back onto their victims.

Book Review - The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

BRIAN KLEPPER

Originally published on Care & Cost here.

The opening page of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladiesbegins with a quote by Susan Sontag that is so on-point, yet so rare and fresh, that one can’t help being excited by the prospect of what’s to come.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

You open the book with great expectations. It is weighty, yes – 570 pages, 100 of which are end notes – but beginning, you immediately find its expansive scholarship wrapped in a writing style so fluid and lyrically engaging that it instantly dispels any hesitancy, and you are captured.

Toward A Healthier America

BRIAN KLEPPER and DAVID KIBBE


Originally Published 12/1/10 on Care & Cost


Note: This article was published to frame the approach that David Kibbe and I have in developing our new national health care professional forum, Care & Cost.  

It’s not that we don’t know what’s wrong with health care or how to fix it. The problem, instead, is how to change a system rigged to protect industry excess over care and cost.


As we begin this forum, we see American health care edging closer to a cliff and dragging the larger American economy with it. The health care cost bubble, inflated by duplication and waste, is poised to pop. At the same time, the industry’s bloat has encouraged innovation, driving improvements in quality, safety and cost throughout health care.

Clinics As Health Care's Transformational Engines

BRIAN KLEPPER


Originally Published 12/1/10 in Medical Home News

The recent explosion of interest in onsite clinics - not just by employers, but by health plans, hospital systems, public health programs, and others - is anything but just another health care fad. At once, clinics’ growing popularity signals purchasers’ weariness with an intransigent, self-interested health system, as well as their guarded optimism about a better way.

If Employers Walked Away From Health Coverage

BRIAN KLEPPER & DAVID C. KIBBE

Originally Published on 11/24/10 on Kaiser Health News

What would happen if the rank and file of America's employers, financially overwhelmed by the burden associated with sponsoring health coverage, suddenly opted out?

It isn't so far-fetched. Enrollment by working age families in private health coveragedropped more than 10 percent over the last decade, as individuals and business were priced out of the coverage market. Others, victims of the downturned economy, have lost their jobs and access to subsidized coverage. Those who still have coverage have narrower benefits with higher out-of-pocket costs than before.

Healthy Eats For Data-Hungry Doctors

DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER

Imagine that an innovative health plan - aware that half or more of health care cost is waste and that physician costs to obtain the identical outcome can vary by as much as eight fold - hopes to sweep market share by producing better quality health care for a dramatically lower cost. So it begins to evaluate its vast data stores. It’s goal is to identify the specialists, outpatient services and hospitals within each market that, for episodes of specific high-frequency or high value conditions, consistently produce the best outcomes at the lowest cost. Imagine that, because higher quality is typically produced at lower costs - there are generally fewer complications and lower incidences of revisiting treatment - the health plan will pay high performers more than low performers. Just as importantly, it will limit the network, steering more patients to high performers and away from low performers.

Keeping An Eye On The Health Care Prize

Published on Kaiser Health News, 9/20/10

Many reformers undoubtedly believe that passage of the health overhaul law laid the issue to rest. But policy's wheels continue to turn, and the process is anything but over.

Decades of fee-for-service reimbursement became the health industry's article of faith, encouraging virtually everyone in the system to do as much as possible to every patient, with half or more of all expenditures wasted or unnecessary. But it was also a recipe for national disaster. Over the last decade, nearly all U.S. economic growth was absorbed by health care.