Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: We Need Clearer Data On The Doctors Being Cut From Residency; Enhanced Games Weren't The Spectacle We Expected
Stat: Medical Schools Diversified. So Where Are All The Diverse Doctors?
Residency, a mandatory three- to seven-year apprenticeship, depending on specialty, is the sole gateway to board certification and independent medical practice in the United States. Failure to complete residency is not a temporary detour, but rather, a career-ending event for most people — one that is not uniformly experienced. (Vanessa Grubbs, 6/1)
The Washington Post: Las Vegas Enhanced Games Was A Doping Revolution That Fizzled
On the one hand, its founders present the Enhanced Games as a new “Apollo mission,” testing the limits of human performance and pushing the boundaries of human potential. On the other, they argued that what today’s enhanced athletes do isn’t really different from tactics used by previous generations. Promotional videos invoked the ancient Greeks, who supposedly used figs, mushrooms and plant seeds to sharpen performance. But it doesn’t take a scientist to understand that there is a difference between eating a fig and injecting EPO (erythropoietin), a hormone that is designed to increase red-blood-cell count, but can also raise the risk of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots and sudden cardiac death. (James Billot, 5/28)
Stat: The Ivory Tower Era Of Science Is Over
Science built an ivory tower when we needed a garden. The tower is beautiful — I mean that. It contains real knowledge and hard-won discoveries. But a tower is vertical, singular, closed. A garden is horizontal, distributed, open. And a garden is resilient precisely because no single point of failure can kill the whole thing. So let’s stop mourning the tower and tend what’s already growing. (Jonathan Jackson, 5/27)
Boulder Daily Camera: The United States May Be The Best Place To Build Universal Health Care
Universal health care is not a symbol of socialism; it is a guard of basic human dignity. In the United States, it could become something distinctly American: a practical system grounded in transparency, flexibility, and accountability. (Wei Zhang, 5/30)
Stat: The U.S. Military Medical Corps Needs A New Approach To Recruitment
Across the tri-service medical corps, encompassing the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the rate of recruitment has consistently struggled to keep pace with separations. A 2024 RAND Corporation study found that a larger-than-expected proportion of physicians are leaving after fulfilling their service obligations, citing pay disparity, administrative burden, and clinical skill degradation as key drivers. (Robert Krasner, 6/1)
