Tag: hospitals

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John Livingston

A Still Noble Profession

I have been following health care polling by Rasmussen, CNN, and Gallup since March 23rd, 2010, when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Since 2018—before Covid, the general public’s feeling about the insurance system and health provider networks has become increasingly more negative. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/health/us-health-care-poll-gallup/index.html Beginning early this year, the patients who have […]

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John Livingston

Stand Up or Stand Down

American Medicine rose from the shadows of Western European medicine in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the early 20th century. Great men and women founded great institutions. Most of those men and women were devout in their religious convictions and in their devotion to first their “calling” and secondly to their […]

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John Livingston

Idaho’s Hospitals – Audits Yes – Unions No

Why do we continue to listen to “experts” who have continually proven to be wrong in their predictions and prognostications? Last week I wrote that “bigger is not better” in many cases. How often have the “experts” in the fields of medical education and public health missed the mark over the past 10 years? The […]

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John Livingston

Bigger is Not Always Better

Everything is getting bigger. In my profession, the doctor-patient relationship has been all but destroyed by “vertical and horizontal integration” with hospital systems buying up medical practices and then employing physicians and physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Then the hospital systems are bought up by insurance companies or vice versa, and then the mega company […]

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John Livingston

Accountability Please

(The contents of this article are the opinion of the author and not necessarily of the Gem State Patriot.) I have written earlier about my concern for the lack of introspection shown by government agencies and hospitals in Idaho as the Covid-19 pandemic winds down. Historically in the medical, surgical, and public health professions out […]

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John Livingston

Op-Ed: The Unexamined Life

(The contents of this article are the opinion of the author and not necessarily of the Gem State Patriot.) I was approached last week by several members of the St. Luke’s medical and nursing staffs about an article that Dr. David Pate placed on his own blog regarding the actions of Dr. Ryan Cole and […]

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John Livingston

Today’s Hospital Quagmire of Ethics vs Profits

Conflicts occur when medical practices are balanced against profitability. Our two major non-profit hospitals in Idaho are in the middle of a cultural war that they have no idea how to extricate themselves from. It comes at a time when some very bad business decisions were made long before Covid arrived on the scene and […]

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John Livingston

And Now for the Rest of the Story

There is so much political NOISE in the world today that one of my great fears is that the great majority of people in our State and country will just “turn it off”. What would happen if there was a day where there just wasn’t any news? Would all the news channels just sign off […]

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John Livingston

Are Today’s Hospitals Big Business or Quality Healthcare?

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 […]

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John Livingston

Now is the Time to be Faithful

Hope springs eternal in Garden City this Christmas season. The celebration of the birth and promise fulfilled by the Baby Jesus will always sustain us no matter the challenges that the secular temporal world can put before us. We must never lose hope for the future. WE know the “rest of the story”. As Mother […]

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John Livingston

Does Government Money Trump the Beliefs of Catholic Hospitals?

Twenty to thirty percent of patients in our country receive their acute health care in hospitals that either have remained Catholic, or that continue to fly the “Catholic” banner. One hundred and fifty million people will be treated in a Catholic hospital in the USA this year. The history of modern-day health care throughout the […]

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John Livingston

St. Al’s is not a Catholic Hospital

Any discussion about abortion should be proceeded with the following statements: “There is no sin greater than God’s Providential Mercy and forgiveness” We should all examine the “logs in our own eyes before being critical of the slivers in the eyes of others”. And finally, we are called to remember that “he who is without […]

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