Op-Ed

Tarbell is highlighting the government fines and penalties businesses pay when they engage in fraudulent or criminal behavior. Often, these fines are just a small part of the firms’ annual revenue and don’t actually serve as a deterrent. To these companies, it’s just the cost of doing business. International company...

Eleven years ago today, while I was still serving as head of corporate communications for Cigna, I flew from Philadelphia to Sacramento to attend the first U.S. screening of a new documentary, Michael Moore’s SiCKO. It never occurred to me as I walked into the historic Crest Theatre that...

This analysis was written by Tarbell board member Diane Archer and originally published in the health news and advisory platform Just Care on 3/6/2019. Tarbell is republishing this piece with permission. 

In the 1960s, with no funding for long-term, chronic dialysis, hospital committees decided who would live and die. It was the federal government that put an end to this practice.

My former colleagues undoubtedly where cheering when they heard Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) come to the defense of private health insurers and trash the idea of improving and expanding Medicare to cover all Americans.

Frances Leath no longer works in management for pharmaceutical industry giant Eli Lilly and Company, but she keeps tabs on the company where she spent the first 15 years of her career. She still lives in Indianapolis, home of the company headquarters. She has watched as Lilly’s dramatic increases...

An Appalachian physician explains how just five insurance powers control most of the market and what that means for patients.

Harris's plan won't work and history will prove it.

Were it not for the business practices of some of the biggest corporations in America that profit from the manufacture and distribution of massive quantities of opioids, many of those we have lost likely would still be with us. How are those big corporations responding? In one notable case...

A retired Tennessee physician and professor watches his state shred the medical safety net of his state. Just when I thought things couldn’t get much worse for the TennCare program, they did. (TennCare is Tennessee’s Medicaid managed care program.) First, Medicaid has not been expanded under the Affordable Care Act in...

An Appalachian physician explains how health care system mergers result in staff layoffs and have negative effects on his community’s economy.

"The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense."

You would think that making the prices charged by hospitals and doctors available to their patients would be a no-brainer.  After all, we’ve become accustomed to knowing the price we pay for cars, carrots, comic books, and almost everything else we buy. Why not knee surgery or appendectomies? The medical...

Insurance company CEOs and their shareholders, that’s who.

The Senate Special Committee on Aging has just released one of the most damning reports on the nation’s nursing homes that I’ve seen in a long time. The short document should be required reading for any family thinking of moving a relative to a nursing facility. Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey,...

Last month, the New York Times ran a cautionary tale about the heart surgery and care astronaut Neil Armstrong received and his death two weeks later at a community hospital in a Cincinnati suburb in 2012. The Times had received documents from an anonymous tipster who said he/she was “compelled...

This New York City subway ad recently caught my attention: “When researching hospitals, consider how much research they do.” The ad for Mt. Sinai Health System advised riders that the research “we do today drives medicine we will do tomorrow,” and the hospital system was proud that it ranked...

I’ve been thinking a lot about health-care mergers and acquisitions lately, and I must confess, it’s making me dizzy. All of this head-spinning thought was prompted primarily by the creation of Ballad Health Care, now the sole hospital system for my entire region of the country. Ballad was established about...

Many Medicare Advantage plans have small networks and high deductibles. If you go out of network, even unknowingly, you will be on the hook for a lot of money out of your own pocket.

Health care industry propagandists proceed cautiously at first-ever hearing on Medicare For All bill.