Author Archives: The Editors

About The Editors

Gregory D. Stevens, PhD, MHS is a health policy researcher, writer, teacher and advocate. He is a professor of public health at California State University, Los Angeles. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Medical Care, and is co-editor of The Medical Care Blog. He is also a co-author of the book Vulnerable Populations in the United States.

Studying Patient Economic Outcomes

By | February 5, 2024

A special supplemental issue of Medical Care supports the growing recognition that patient economic outcomes matter in health care. Sponsored by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the issue highlights studies that explore the relationship between economic outcomes, patient care, health outcomes and equity. Patient-centered… Read More »

Meet the Blog’s Newest Addition to the Editorial Team: Ben King

By | November 9, 2023

Ben King is joining our editorial team at The Medical Care Blog! Dr. King (he/him) is currently an Assistant Professor of Population Health at the new Tilman J Fertitta Family College of Medicine at the University of Houston. He has additional appointments in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, with the UH-Humana Integrated Health… Read More »

A Significant Step Toward Single Payer Health Care in California

By | October 26, 2023

California just took a significant step toward single payer health care. On Oct 7, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 770 (Unified Health Care Financing) into law. Introduced by Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the law directs the Secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency to research, develop and pursue a waiver framework… Read More »

Getting postpartum care is unaffordable for many women

By | August 22, 2023

Known as the fourth trimester of care, postpartum care has become unaffordable for many women. The costs of care are increasing, due to rising deductibles, increasing chronic diseases, and a lack of access to Medicaid. While postpartum care technically refers to the 12-week period after delivery, there is a movement to recognize that adequate postpartum… Read More »

Public Health Saved Your Life Today: Insight From Dr. Leana Wen

Public health saved your life today, but you probably didn’t know it. That was one of the valuable take-home messages from Dr. Leana Wen, when she spoke to public health students and early career professionals at California State University Los Angeles. Dr. Wen was the culminating speaker in our semester-long series on public health leadership.… Read More »

See Yourself as a Leader: A Conversation with Jackie Valenzuela

See yourself as a leader. That is one of the key messages from Jackie Valenzuela, Chief Advisor to the County Health Officer of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. She has held multiple leadership positions within the one of nation’s largest public health departments. And she recounts coming to them by being open… Read More »

Don’t Wait to Lead: A Conversation with Dr. Chris Chanyasulkit

Don’t wait to lead. That is a key message from Dr. Chris Chanyasulkit, the president of the American Public Health Association (APHA). And it resonates with many students and early career professionals anxious to make a change. Our conversation with Dr. Chanyasulkit was the first in a series on public health leadership. The Department of… Read More »

The U.S. Pandemic Public Health Emergency Declaration Has Ended

By | May 13, 2023

The pandemic public health emergency declaration ends today in the United States. Here, I share a look back and what to expect going forward. One thing is clear: with this change in designation, the U.S. has revealed that its public health preparedness was always meant to be temporary. Where we started It was December 12,… Read More »

Medicare Advantage Should Be Making News

By | March 3, 2023

Medicare Advantage should be making news. It’s not because the Medicare trust fund continues to run on fumes, which it does. Nor is it because Medicare was taken “off the table” in recent debates about cutting the federal budget, which it was. Rather, it should be getting a lot of attention for new data about its… Read More »

Healthy Intersections Podcast: February 2023

By | February 10, 2023

This month’s podcast features a round-up of this month’s blog posts and a summary of three articles recently published in the journal Medical Care. Listen here or via your favorite podcast platform! Transcript Hello friends. Welcome to the Healthy Intersections Podcast for February 2023. This podcast is sponsored by the American Public Health Association’s Medical… Read More »

Is It Time for Medicaid-For-All?

By | February 1, 2023

It isn’t what supporters of single-payer health care might prefer. But a Medicaid-for-all program, based on the already expansive safety-net program, might open new doors to universal coverage. And rising familiarity with the program is creating a window of opportunity. My realization began with several conversations First, it was a friend going through a divorce… Read More »

November 2022 Healthy Intersections Podcast

In this month’s podcast, Dr. Samy Anand gives an overview of The Medical Care Blog posts published in October and a preview of the journal articles in the November issue of Medical Care. Then, co-editor of the blog, Dr. Gregory Stevens, discusses the results of the midterm election and the results of ballot measures relevant to… Read More »

Public health is (once again) on the ballot

By | November 29, 2022

The 2022 midterm elections are upon us. And public health is once again prominent on the ballot. Think back to the 2020 presidential election and just how stark a contrast Joe Biden and Donald Trump presented on COVID-19, climate change, and the Affordable Care Act. This year is no different. Voters across the country are choosing… Read More »

Medicare Will Negotiate Prescription Drug Prices…In Four Years

By | August 25, 2022

In 2026, Medicare will negotiate prescription drug prices with manufacturers. It is a dramatic reversal of a stranglehold placed on Medicare back in 2003. And it may be one of the most impactful policy changes to the government program since its creation. But there is a catch…we have to wait. President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction… Read More »

Retrospective: On Prescription Drugs

By | August 22, 2022

The Medical Care Blog is preparing for its full return later this month. Until then, we are continuing to highlight articles published by our contributors on timely topics. A federal bill is pending that would allow Medicare to begin negotiating drug prices for the very first time. Even though it would begin with only 10… Read More »

Fixing Health Care: A Health Care Revolt Begs Five Big Questions

In a previous post, we shared highlights from an event about fixing health care featuring Dr. Michael Fine, a family medicine physician, former public health official, and the author of Health Care Revolt. The faculty of the Department of Public Health at California State University Los Angeles led the event as part of a department-wide book read.… Read More »

A Health Care Revolt Begins with Us

Readers of this blog know the problems of U.S. health care well. Principally, it is absurdly expensive, deeply inequitable, and contributes relatively little to overall public health. Yet, most people aware of these problems have been sidelined, feeling incapable of changing things and left hoping for reform to come from within. But health care providers… Read More »

Category: All

Is Something Going Wrong With the Patient Centered Medical Home?

By | January 27, 2022

Like others working at the intersection of public health and medicine, my faith in primary care has long been unshakeable. Increasingly actualized as the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH), primary care has experienced a decade plus of attention thanks to efforts at retooling and rebranding the field. But in the last week, a tiny crack formed… Read More »

Wrapped in Services and Art, Los Angeles Opens Tiny Homes for People Experiencing Homelessness

In Los Angeles, the nation’s homelessness epidemic is playing out in broad relief. Criticized for an inability to visibly stem the local crisis, Los Angeles is now responding. Opening villages of tiny homes for people experiencing homelessness is part of a recent package of efforts gaining traction in the city. The situation in Los Angeles… Read More »

Category: All

Thank You, Texas. Love, California

By | August 5, 2021

It’s hard to turn down a free lunch. It’s perhaps a little harder still if you’re paying for the free lunches of others. Yet, a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), that’s what is happening in some states. Legislatures opposed to the ACA are refusing federal dollars for Medicaid expansion; dollars that other… Read More »

Category: All

Time for the COVID-19 vaccine plan to include primary care

President Biden released the National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness on January 21, 2020. It is an ambitious attempt to decrease the spread of the novel coronavirus and get hundreds of millions of Americans immunized. This COVID-19 vaccine plan, however, is missing a key element. Namely, primary care. An incomplete national strategy for… Read More »

End-of-year post: 2020 edition

By | December 28, 2020

This past year at The Medical Care Blog has been quite an adventure. Like the rest of humanity, we were thrown into a whole new reality with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our first posts about SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus) and COVID-19 (the disease it causes) began in mid-March and haven’t stopped since. All told — across… Read More »

Student Voices at The Medical Care Blog

By | December 14, 2020

The Medical Care Blog regularly welcomes and features the voices of students from public health, medicine and other health professional fields. Most of our student contributors are earlier in their careers than the health care providers, public health professionals, and academic researchers who contribute to our dialogue most often. But they are frequently experts in… Read More »

On the Eve of a Public Health Election

By | November 2, 2020

Health care and public health loom large today, on the eve of the presidential election. From COVID-19 to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this is now clearly a public health election. Let’s review what’s on people’s minds and what’s at stake. Where are voters on health issues? In February of this year, health care was… Read More »

A Revisionist History of COVID-19

Note from the Editors: Last week capped two jam-packed weeks of political nominating convention activities. COVID-19 was discussed at both conventions. The Washington Post fact-checked some of the health care claims at the Democratic convention. Here, with the permission of Kaiser Health News and Politifact, we are republishing their recent fact-checking of the COVID-19 content from the Republican… Read More »

A story of primary care: neighborhood deprivation and health spending

By | July 2, 2020

A new study out this month in Medical Care by Yongkang Zhang and colleagues finds that people in struggling neighborhoods have considerably higher spending on potentially preventable health care. While overall health care spending was similar between the most deprived areas and average communities, the finding about spending on potentially preventable health care tells an… Read More »

For pennies on the dollar, public health is succeeding out of the spotlight

By | May 26, 2020

Every night at 8pm, my neighborhood in Los Angeles, like many, cheers for the front-line health care providers who care for our communities. My family joins in the nightly raucous thanks. But a few nights ago, we paused. Where were the cheers for the public health professionals? Medical professionals have been in the spotlight, doing the… Read More »

What presidential candidates say about healthcare: 2020 edition

By | February 12, 2020

Health care is on everyone’s mind. Here’s what presidential candidates say about healthcare: the 2020 edition. We are two weeks into the 2020 presidential primary season. On the Democratic side, muddled results in Iowa and very close results in New Hampshire have sprung some surprises. Currently at the top of the Democratic field are Pete… Read More »

Introducing a Special Series on School Health

By | December 2, 2019

This month, The Medical Care Blog is hosting a series of posts about the importance of school health. Following up on our 2016 series on the childhood roots of inequity (read the first in the series here), we are dedicating our Thursdays this month to posts that reflect on the health challenges that confront schools.… Read More »

Identifying Team-Based Primary Care is a Major Challenge

By | October 2, 2019

I have written a lot about primary care. I’ve covered its role in reducing ED visits, discussed the benefits of one of its most unique facets (coordination of care), and described the challenges of younger adults moving away from traditional models of primary care. It is hard to overstate just how important this field of medicine… Read More »

At 5 Years: Great Blog Posts That (Almost) Nobody Read

By | September 12, 2019

We announced last week that The Medical Care Blog has reached its 5-year milestone. As part of the editorial team, I’m excited to pause briefly and reflect on some great blog posts about healthcare that I think deserve to have been more widely read. Contributions from our authors have helped us reach more than 80,000… Read More »

Can Technology Help Reduce Health Disparities?

Health and health care disparities are frustratingly persistent. This is widely known, in great part, because of the landmark report Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care that then spurred the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to track and report on disparities for 250 measures since the early 2000s. The… Read More »

Staying Current in Primary Care Research: An Attempt to Take Stock

By | April 25, 2019

For months, I’ve been keenly interested in trying to explore where the field of primary care research stands. It’s daunting to pull your head up from your own research, take stock of what your colleagues (both known and unknown) are doing and try to assess where the field is advancing. Doing this every now and… Read More »

Health Care Revolt–Reflections on Democracy and Medicine

By | March 2, 2021

“A book lying idle on the shelf is wasted ammunition.” – Henry Miller, The Books in My Life (1952) The Medical Care Blog is home to many strong opinions.  In the last year, contributors have written provocatively about the political determinants of health, highlighted the per-mile cost of President Trump’s wall in numbers of children who… Read More »

What’s Happening with Medicare for All?

By | January 31, 2019

It’s a new season. The federal government re-opened this week after a record-breaking shut-down.  Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, feeling newly emboldened after the dispute about a border wall.  A gaggle of 2020 presidential hopefuls has revealed themselves in recent weeks, lining up to be, arguably, the most liberal class of… Read More »

Swiping left and the evolution of primary care

By | September 25, 2019

A few weeks ago, a headline in the Chicago Tribune grabbed my attention: “Millennials are trading primary care doctors for faster, cheaper alternatives.” This headline fits the rather unfortunate stereotype of millennials as impatient, job-hopping, financially-struggling, digital natives. But if this is true, then millennials are bound to “swipe left” to health care delivered in a… Read More »

Medical Care for Social Good: A Proposal for P-Corp Certification

By | December 19, 2018

In the new US consumer marketplace, doing good for society is powerful. Choices that people are making about how their food is grown, how companies test household products and reduce their impact on the environment, and how companies make their profits are driving new business models. Farmers are changing their pest and weed-control methods, manufacturers are… Read More »

Three Reasons Why the Pro-ACA Resistance Should Take Heart

By | February 25, 2019

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) had a roller-coaster of a year.  It began with threats of almost certain repeal, followed by effort after unsuccessful effort to dismantle it. Then in the last days of 2017, there was the successful repeal of the individual mandate penalty. This was brazen politics, suspenseful and often agonizing.   It… Read More »

Preventing Health Care that Almost Nobody Needs

By | September 28, 2017

Medicine, alongside achievements in sanitation and public health, remains one of the major achievements of modern society. The reduction (or eradication) of many infectious diseases from the developed world, breakthroughs in anesthesiology and surgery, and advances in the care of chronic diseases (including HIV) are just a few of the multitudes of achievements. But these… Read More »

Trying to Reduce Unnecessary Emergency Visits? First, Strengthen Our Primary Care System

By | May 26, 2017

Emergency departments (EDs) nationwide are busy places. In some locales they are overcrowded. In places like Los Angeles and other dense, urban areas with high poverty, they are over-capacity to such an extent that they can grind to a halt for all but the highest priority cases. In years past, it was not unheard of for… Read More »

The Person-Centered Wellness Home: Reflections on a Conversation with Dr. Thelma Mielenz

By | October 31, 2016

With the mania of the presidential election in full tilt and the election just days away, it’s hard to have a rational public discussion about health care.  Supporters of the two presidential candidates have drawn a deep and divisive line (or rather a tectonic fissure) in the sand about health care reform.  This is due, in great part, to the bombastic, and ultimately… Read More »

Tools to improve coordination in primary care

By | July 28, 2016

Last month, I left readers with a bit of cliffhanger: How do we actually improve care coordination? Last time, I suggested there were some great ideas, and now it’s time to delve into three promising strategies: 1) individualize and personalize the electronic medical record (EMR); 2. fix the hospital discharge process; and 3) make it a part of normal practice to measure care coordination. Read on for more about each of these tools…

Is Care Coordination the Magic Bullet in Primary Care?

By | June 14, 2016

Decades of thoughtful research into how we design health care systems has shown that primary care is essential.  We know enough to confidently say that systems responsible for the overall health of patients (like health insurance plans or the Veterans Administration) that choose to skimp on primary care do so at their own peril.  But in a time… Read More »

The Health Plans of the Democratic Presidential Candidates and How They May Affect Primary Care

By | October 2, 2017

Nearly halfway through the primaries, the Democratic primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders continues. And perhaps nothing sets these candidates further apart in the progressiveness of their agenda than their approaches to health care. In this post, let’s take a look at the vastly different approaches to health care proposed by candidates Clinton and Sanders, with a particular focus on primary care.

How Primary Care Might Fare Under The Plans of the Two Leading Republican Presidential Contenders

By | June 14, 2016

The presidential primaries are in full swing and health care is an issue for both parties. The candidates have left themselves plenty of wiggle room, but there is enough information in the public domain to make some predictions about what the different approaches (and they are different) would mean for the health care system. This… Read More »

The intersection of physician gender and quality of care

By | June 14, 2016

According to data out this month from the Kaiser Family Foundation, there are 2 male doctors for every 1 female in practice in the US. This translates to about 300,000 fewer women than men in practice today. This gender difference is a disparity that many in health care may think has resolved, but in fact… Read More »