12 REASONS HEALTH CARE IS IN CRISIS
Last year at about this time the New England Journal of Medicine published an article entitled ?Options for slowing the growth of health care costs?. In table 1 there are listed 12 options for cost savings, ranked from highest to lowest potential. The NEJM is one of the most influential and respected medical journals in the world. If you Google the lead author, James J. Mongan, M.D., you get 736 entries. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of Partners HealthCare, the Medical Group Practice associated with Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also Professor of Health Care Policy and Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. There is probably no more distinguished and respected doctor in the country. Yet not only did he not come up with any practical, doable solution to the Health Care Financial Crisis, he did not even correctly identify the real origins of the problem.