"Health & Medical News"

In the fall I rotated through the geriatrics ward. One of the attending physicians was an irritating woman whose idea of the Socratic method was pimping you with really vague questions, then acting like she had already thought of whatever answers you gave and that you were only telling her what she already knew. The other attending was a throwback to “the days of the giants,” when pneumococcal pneumonia was diagnosed by injecting sputum into mice and antibiotics for urinary tract infections were tested on agar plates. One morning, one of my interns presented a case to him of an elderly man who had been hospitalized with fever and a cough producing green sputum. “He has pneumonia,” she proclaimed confidently. “Take a look at this chest X-ray.” She pulled up a digital image on a computer screen showing a distinct pneumonic streak. The senior physician waved it off. “First tell me about your lung exam,” he said.

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Washington — The American College of Physicians has endorsed the concept of a single-payer health care system for the first time.

In a new position paper, the organization, which represents 124,000 physicians in internal medicine and related subspecialties, identified a system in which the federal government is the sole third-party payer as one of two reform vehicles to achieve universal coverage. The other is a public-private system that includes a legal guarantee that everyone has access to coverage and that offers health care subsidies to low-income residents.

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