Opinion: We ventured into the Medicare Part D drug plan forest — and got lost
My wife and I recently became eligible for Medicare’s prescription drug coverage, known as Medicare…
Category: First Opinion
Opinion: 5 most widely read First Opinions of 2019
It’s been a banner year for First Opinion. We published nearly 500 essays written by…
Opinion: Improving the next generation of drugs through patient-centric design for clinical trials
When a process works, it’s natural to try to repeat it rather than recreate or…
Opinion: Lost, and sometimes found, in the emergency department at Christmas
Last Christmas, I traded my cozy bed for a shift working in my hospital’s accident…
Opinion: Star Wars and the U.S. health care system share this: bloat
The final film in the epic Star Wars saga, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”…
Opinion: To make advanced therapies, we need to industrialize personalization
What’s the best way to measure the real rate of progress in personalized cell therapies,…
Opinion: Tech and health care need their own ‘Hippocratic oath’ to make digital health work
When a whistleblower revealed the details of Project Nightingale, a collaboration between Google and the…
Opinion: Biologics lose protection as U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement moves forward
The excision of a key term in the pending United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA), which…
Opinion: Aducanumab isn’t the simple solution to the complicated Alzheimer’s crisis
This year’s Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease meeting began in mid-December with a bang and…
Opinion: Orphan Drug Act’s ‘nonprofitability’ loophole needs to be closed
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration took the unusual step of admitting it had…
Opinion: Manufacturing: the next breakthrough in gene therapy
I never thought I’d see the day when words like “process,” “scale,” and “automation” would…
Opinion: Deadline looms to stop the Health Insurance Tax — but Congress has been there before
It has become something of an unintentional tradition in Congress to allow key votes to…
Opinion: Integrated care opens new doors to mental health, addiction care
In every American community — wealthy or poor, rural or urban, young or old —…
Opinion: BMJ should retract flawed research paper on chronic fatigue syndrome
Few journals have been more admirable than The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) and…
Opinion: Congress: Don’t eliminate funding for the diversity creating Health Career Opportunity Program
The Senate is preparing to make a big mistake with a small budget item. On…
Opinion: Machine learning for clinical decision-making: pay attention to what you don’t see
Even as machine learning and artificial intelligence are drawing substantial attention in health care, overzealousness…
Opinion: More Americans are dying at home. Is that a good thing?
How Americans die has fundamentally changed with advances in medical technology and the ways diseases…
Opinion: Oral immunotherapy can be a game changer for many with food allergies
Food allergies upend lives. In children, food allergies can scale back or completely stop participation…
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Opinion: 11-country survey of primary care physicians shows where U.S. is lagging and keeping pace
Primary care is the backbone of any high-performing health care system. It works best when…
Opinion: I thought patriarchy in science was fading. Then I saw it in the data
As I returned home from this year’s Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference, one…
Opinion: Do large pharma companies provide drug development innovation? Our analysis says no
Large pharmaceutical companies oppose legislation being considered by Congress to lower the prices of prescription…
Opinion: H.R. 3 is the wrong path to lower drug costs
Americans want health care to be less expensive. We also want our health care to…
Opinion: The EPA’s proposed ‘transparency rule’ will harm health, safety, and the environment
A proposed rule by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that allegedly aims to strengthen transparency…
Opinion: Aducanumab: the beginning of the end of Alzheimer’s disease?
In histories written about Alzheimer’s disease, 2019 will turn up as a landmark year, one…
Opinion: Cutting 700,000 Americans from SNAP will increase health costs
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is our nation’s first line of defense against food…
Opinion: Creating a Facebook for cell communication can help treat disease
Everyone, it seems, uses Facebook and LinkedIn these days. Social networking sites make it incredibly…
Opinion: Step aside, biomarkers. Look to the bank account for early signs of dementia
One crucial missing piece to the devastating puzzle of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of…
Opinion: U.S. continues to lead the fight against antibiotic resistance
One of the greatest threats to public health today, in the United States and around…
Opinion: Protect patient access to drug infusions administered in physician offices
As gastroenterologists, we treat patients in Portland, Ore., and Des Moines, Iowa, with challenging disorders…
Opinion: Medicaid covers sick or dying children. But it takes ‘going to battle’ to get it
One of the first things that happens when you find out your child has a…
Opinion: The view from West Virginia: the end of HIV transmission is a distant dream
“End the AIDS epidemic” seems to be the battle cry of the day. It’s a lofty…
Opinion: Policymakers are taking the wrong approach to health care reform
Here’s what good health care looks like: it emphasizes prevention, is accessible and affordable, and…
Opinion: Concussions, broken bones, and more: a week of football in the U.S.
News about concussions and other injuries to young football players appears with alarming frequency, as…
Opinion: Changing emergency doctors’ behaviors to promote wider use of medication for opioid use disorder
Emergency departments have become the front line in the battle against the epidemic of opioid…
Opinion: In pricing our gene therapy, Bluebird weighed value, shared risk, and a lifetime cap
It is hard to not get emotional when you witness the unfair reality of terrible…
Opinion: Barring cisgender women from the Descovy trials was a bad call
Of the estimated 38 million people living with HIV around the world, more than half…
Opinion: Some bipartisan support for biosimilars is good. More would be better
In today’s hyperpartisan and gridlocked political climate, we should seize any opportunity for bipartisan agreement…
Opinion: Letting academic medical centers make CAR-T drugs would save billions
Draw blood from someone with cancer. Engineer their blood cells to seek and destroy cancer….
Opinion: In the hospital supply chain, too many choices can be costly
Not long ago, I did a small experiment at a hospital in Texas: I put…