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Fake news? Alternative facts? Overly hyped “breakthroughs”? Irreproducible scientific research results? Preprints? Gaslighting the medical literature? What to do?

Finding and trusting the best published primary medical literature is the answer. Our speakers for the 12th Annual Lundberg Institute Lecture at The Commonwealth Club, JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo and BMJ Editor in Chief Kamran Abbasi, are among the premier guardians of that literature. Hear their advice, and then ask them your own questions about whom and what to trust—especially now when deciding which medical information is trustworthy has become so crucial and so confusing.

“Deconstructing America’s High Priced Healthcare”

The seventh annual Lundberg Institute Lecture welcomes Elisabeth Rosenthal, MD, author of “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back.”

Speaker

Elisabeth Rosenthal, MD, is the author of the 2017 New York Times bestseller, “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back.” She was a reporter and senior writer at the New York Times for 22 years, winning numerous awards for her coverage of health and the environment as well as for foreign coverage in China. Her series, “Paying Till it Hurts,” is credited with catalyzing a national conversation on America’s high-priced care. Since 2016, she has been Editor-in-Chief of Kaiser Health News, an independent non-profit newsroom based in Washington DC, focusing on health and health policy.

Moderator

George Lundberg, MD, Professor, Pathology, Health Research Policy, Stanford University; Editor-at-Large, Medscape; Founder of The Lundberg Institute

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back,” the talk will look at just that. Everyone knows that the U.S. health system is by far the most expensive in the world, with spending/prices for drugs, procedures and hospitalizations that are many times those in other developed countries. And for all that, we don’t generally get better care or better results. I’ll look at the evolution of the U.S. health system over the last 3 decades and how it moved from a caring endeavor to a financially driven system where profit rather than patient good was the prime motivation. I’ll trace how commercial forces and interests were allowed to insinuate themselves into medical practice, step-by-step, so no one protested much…or even noticed…until the prices got sky high. We now live in a system where medical machinery comes with brochures on how to recoup return-on-investment and ambulance companies as well as dialysis units are owned by venture capital firms.  But the ultimate message is one of optimism and hope. Once patients-voters-consumers understand how the system functions and how our healthcare has been hijacked for profit, the book offers many ways to push back, to begin untangling the mess we’re in. I discuss some of those, from strategies to protect your wallet when you enter the hospital or doctor’s office to reforms that should be voter issues at the state and national level. I believe that if patients and physicians stand up for medicine we will get better, cheaper care. The books ends: “Given the false choice between your money or your life, it’s time to take a stand for the latter.

Announcing the 2014 Lundberg Institute Lecture: “The Checklist Manifesto and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” on Wednesday, October 22 at 12:30 PM PST.

Speaker:
Atul Gawande MD, Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School and at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Location:
CMWC at 575 Market St in San Francisco. Tickets are available at www.commonwealthclub.org . Advance purchase is strongly recommended.

Announcing The Second Annual Lundberg Institute Lecture: “A Bright Future for Health Care: Is It Possible?” on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 at 6:00 PM PST.

Speaker:
Donald Berwick, MD, Former President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement; Former Administrator, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Speaker Details:
The second annual Lundberg Institute Lecture welcomes Dr. Berwick, who studies the management of health care systems with emphasis on using scientific methods and evidence-based medicine and comparative effectiveness research to improve the tradeoff among quality, safety and costs. In the ongoing difficult transition to the Obama health plan, Dr. Berwick’s analysis of these issues has been resisted by Republican lawmakers. So has his forthright conclusion that “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.” Also hear Dr. Berwick’s ideas on whether government rationing of health care is to be feared or embraced. MLF(s)