I spent 16 years practicing medicine and surgery in the United States Navy. Some of the best surgeons and most compassionate physicians I ever met in my 46-year career were in the Navy. Military medicine like the Veterans Administration (VA) system and the Indian Health Service (IHS) is a single payor socialized form of medicine. […]
Over twenty years ago I first was introduced to the concepts of “asymmetry, agency, and scale” while visiting my son’s finance class during parents’ weekend at Gonzaga. The teacher of the class, Mr. Kent Hickman was one of the authors of the textbook FOUNDATIONS OF CORPORATE FINANCE that is used even today at many colleges […]
As many of our readers may know that three years ago, I moved to New Meadows Idaho from Meridian as the neighborhood I lived in was becoming more congested with traffic and slowly but surely deteriorating and turning into something I didn’t want to deal with. As I told Kevin Miller many times, I needed […]
For the last several weeks I have been reviewing cancer survival statistics from patients that were treated for their disease during the pandemic. My eyes are glossing over from reading Meier-Kaplan curves. The Meier-Kaplan curve is a graphical representation of the survival function. It shows the probability that a subject will survive up to time […]
One of the hardest aspects about retiring, I still hope to volunteer and hope to do mission work, is accepting the fact that I am increasingly becoming professionally less relevant. In some ways, this has crossed over into my personal life. Last Mother’s Day my granddaughter and I approached the maitre d at The River […]
Higher education has become obsessed with “woke culture.” I graduated from Medical School at THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY in 1976. Already at that time “sensitivity training” and cultural awareness programs were starting up. These were not in the basic or clinical sciences but could be found in Public Health Departments. The Department of Engineering at […]
Organized medicine in all the modern Western Countries over the past 100 years has been at best progressive and in selected instances fascist in its application of moral and ethical standards. For conservatives, the predicate for any policy position or legal edict can be found in Biblical and Natural Law Principles. We look backwards to […]
Where are the grown-ups? Where are our leaders? In 2020, early in the Covid Political Pandemic, Congress increased the Federal Governments Medicaid “match”. As one of the conditions for receiving these extra monies, States cannot disenroll Medicaid beneficiaries who become ineligible. Only those that die, leave a State or request to be disenrolled are dropped […]
The day I retired I was honored to receive a phone call from Governor Otter asking me to serve on the new Idaho Health Insurance Exchange Board. I was not in favor of the Exchange, but I saw an opportunity moving forward to possibly “privatize the exchange” and put it in the hands of health […]
The after-action reports and the Monday morning quarterbacking have yet to take place regarding our State’s Covid response. Maybe we are waiting until after the November general elections. Historically in the medical and nursing professions every death and every bad outcome is reviewed at the clinical level giving context to the analysis done at the […]
I was blessed to practice surgery and medicine for 44 years. Almost half of that time was in the Navy, the other half in Boise. Twenty-five years ago, I was asked to help rebuild the trauma center at St. Al’s and I was lucky enough to recruit four outstanding surgeons from three outstanding medical schools. […]
Tonight, I am in San Antonio Texas at Ft. Sam Houston. I am teaching for the last time a course for military doctors and surgeons that I have been part of since 1983. We have military and civilian instructors. Several of the instructors work full time for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the […]