Author: Lance Garrison
Imagine you wake up with blurry vision. Your doctor refers you to a specialist but your insurance blocks the referral. Call me to defend why you think this patient needs this. That causes you to go blind. Imagine you have multiple sclerosis. Without warning, your insurance stops your medications. No, you cannot give this drug. So you become paralyzed. Imagine your father has cancer. His doctor orders an M.R.I. No, you cannot order this imaging. Prescribes chemotherapy. Have you considered this other less expensive option? His insurance causes delay after delay. No, you don’t need this surgery. He dies. An…
Should your insurance company be allowed to stop you from getting a treatment — even if your doctor says it’s necessary?Doctors are often required to get insurance permission before providing medical care. This process is called prior authorization and it can be used by profit-seeking insurance companies to create intentional barriers between patients and the health care they need.At best, it’s just a minor bureaucratic headache. At worst, people have died.Prior authorization has been around for decades, but doctors say its use has increased in recent years and now rank it as one of the top issues in health care.To…
One could be forgiven for thinking that President Biden’s tough words on the Israel-Hamas war in his State of the Union address and his MSNBC interview on Saturday was the beginning of a much more critical U.S. policy toward Israel. After all, the president called for at least a temporary cease-fire, laying out, in his most emotional terms to date, the losses and suffering of the people of Gaza and delivered an unmistakably sharp signal that Israel must make the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza a priority. Those calls came on the heels of Vice President Kamala Harris’s high-profile…
Most of this year I have worked to center memories of Orli’s better moments, the joy she infused in each minute she got to live. One month after her first brain tumor surgery, when she’d rebounded better than any of us could have hoped, we met old friends from Spain for dinner. As we ate, a sudden, drenching storm came up. Orli got up and ran into the warm rain with our friends’ children, dancing, thrilled. It was, she told me, a “bucket list moment.”She seemed to realize, far earlier than I, she had to lean into each experience, to…
One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarized subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or DACA for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.At last month’s conference, Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good,…
America is politically polarized. But there is an issue on which both sides agree: We need more privacy and TikTok should not be banned.A record 72 percent of Americans want “more government regulation” of what companies can do with their data, according to an October report from Pew Research Center. And only 31 percent of Americans favor a nationwide ban on TikTok, according to a February Associated Press-NORC opinion poll.Despite public sentiment, the U.S. House passed legislation on Wednesday by an overwhelming majority that could force TikTok to divest from control by its Chinese parent company or be banned. It’s…
By Alison Feller, as told to Candy SchulmanWhen I was 7, I was on a family vacation, living my best life. Or so I thought. I wasn’t sick – until I was. There were no symptoms that indicated Crohn’s was coming. I was losing weight, but I was a super active kid. Suddenly I started throwing up a lot. I had a fever. Back home, my dad took me to the hospital for all sorts of tests. A specialist did an endoscopy and saw all the inflammation in my digestive tract.My family didn’t know how to navigate my Crohn’s diagnosis.…
As Democrats puzzle over how President Biden can be so unpopular, it’s worth looking at the global context — because he’s actually doing better than most Western leaders.In the Morning Consult approval ratings for global leaders, Biden polls better than leaders in Canada, Britain, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, France and Japan.Here in America, we often attribute Biden’s unpopularity to his age, and that’s certainly part of it. But youthful leaders abroad are even less popular: In Britain, people fault the 43-year-old prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for being “too inexperienced for these grim times,” as The…
“I almost voted for him,” Felicia Lowe, a 55-year-old Black woman, told me on Tuesday as she exited the polling place at the Metropolitan branch of the Fulton County Library.The “him” in that statement is Donald Trump, and Lowe said that she had intended to vote for him the first time he ran for president, but she was diagnosed with cancer and didn’t vote that year.Trump, she said, is “funny as hell.” Her granddaughter, impatiently waiting in her shadow, admonished her, “Nana, no cursing.”Lowe says she’s glad that she didn’t vote for Trump back then because she now thinks “he’s…
Back to the nerds: On Tuesday Berners-Lee published an open letter on Medium that said the web was intended “to be a tool to empower humanity” that “was decentralized with a long tail of content and options.” In the past decade, though, he wrote, “instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them.”Berners-Lee is developing and proselytizing for a new system that gives each person his or her own personal online-only data store, or POD for short. The PODs let people decide how their data is managed, used and shared. The Flanders region of…