Janice Hopkins Tanne

The US spends twice as much on healthcare as comparable nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) but Americans experience worse health and are the only citizens who are not guaranteed universal healthcare, a report by the Commonwealth Fund has found.1The Commonwealth Fund, which supports research to promote better healthcare, focused its latest analysis on excess US health spending. It found that about 60% of US excess spending was from administrative costs, prescription drugs, and wages for physicians and nurses—costs which likely reflected higher US prices.An earlier report by the fund found that compared with other rich countries, life expectancy …

Surgical department leaders in the US do not reflect the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the patients they treat, a study in JAMA Surgery by researchers at eight leading US medical centres has found.1Diversity in the physician workforce is recognised as necessary for better patient outcomes, yet US surgical leadership positions are not diverse and do not include doctors who come from groups that are underrepresented in medicine. These groups include women, African Americans, Asians, and Hispanic, Latino, or people of Spanish origin—and they tend to be clustered in roles that do not lead to department chairs.In an accompanying editorial Melina Kibbe, dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, said …

The current physician shortage which is limiting care for millions of Americans is about to get worse, the president of the American Medical Association has warned.“The physician shortage that we have long feared is already here. It’s an urgent crisis hitting every corner of this country with the most direct impact hitting families with high needs and limited means,” said Jesse Ehrenfeld in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on 25 October.1The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that over the next decade the US will be short of between 37 000 to over 100 000 doctors.Ehrenfeld called for Congress to act on several fronts to relieve the situation, from increasing Medicare payments to reducing bureaucracy and supporting doctors’ mental health.He said that more than 83 million people in the US, out …

Abortions increased slightly in the United States in the year after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion and allowed states to make their own rules following the Dobbs versus Jackson decision in June 2022.12 But there was a great variability, with abortions dropping dramatically in some states and increasing greatly in others.3Ushma Upadhyay, co-chair of #WeCount, a report by the Society of Family Planning, and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said, “A year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, abortion access in the United States plummeted to near zero in some states while increasing to meet …

The Texas Supreme Court, the state’s highest court, has heard a case challenging the state’s restrictive abortion law by women who say it endangered their health when they had pregnancy complications.The case, Zurawski v State of Texas, is the first case in which women have sued, claiming they were harmed by the state’s ban on abortion.1 Texas passed SB 8 in September 2021, prohibiting abortion once fetal cardiac activity was detected, effectively banning abortion after six weeks, before …

A Texas district court judge has granted a woman an emergency temporary restraining order to allow her to have an abortion of her non-viable pregnancy despite Texas’s ban on abortions.12Kate Cox, 31, a married mother of two children, was hoping to have a third child but discovered at 20 weeks of pregnancy that the fetus had trisomy 18, which meant that lethal abnormalities would lead to the death of the fetus in utero or shortly after birth.At the time of going to press it was not known whether Cox had had the procedure. …