Hospital executives with a conscience may have a tough time navigating the corrupting waters of our healthcare system.  Mr. John Chamberlain is a self-described “recovering” hospital CEO with over 35 years of experience as a hospital and physician practice executive.  In this interview with Anish Koka, he relates how his attempts to do right by…

President Trump’s June 24, 2019 Executive Order on health care transparency contains a key provision regarding direct primary care.  We have the pleasure of having back on the show Dr. Lee Gross.  Dr. Gross and colleagues in the DPC movements were instrumental in getting the White House to clarify a prior ambiguity regarding how direct…

What can we learn from the experience of a 90-year-old patient who is told point-blank “You’ll be dead in a year!” and who survives to tell the story? This is a first of its kind in the annals of the Accad and Koka Report.  The episode starts with a 15-minute interview conducted by Dr. Koka…

It is commonly believed that healthcare is a sector plagued by “market failure.” A heavy dose of government intervention is therefore necessary to optimize the needs of society. A paper most commonly cited in support of that view is one published in 1963 by Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of economic…

It is commonly believed that healthcare is a sector plagued by “market failure.” A heavy dose of government intervention is therefore necessary to optimize the needs of society. A paper most commonly cited in support of that view is one published in 1963 by Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of economic…

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ lawsuit against Purdue Pharmaceuticals exemplifies a common narrative that lays a large part of the blame for the opioid epidemic at the feet of the manufacturer of prescription opioids for manipulating physicians into prescribing the drugs more liberally.  Is there merit to that story? To examine that question, we have as…

Is the healthcare mess so hopeless that physicians should either leave it or wait for it to collapse?  Are there legislative steps that doctors can take to tangibly improve the practice of medicine?  And, if so, how should physicians act within the problematic framework of “organized medicine” to bring about such changes? Our guest is…

Is the body a machine?  Are doctors mere technicians who simply “fix” biological defects in their patients?  In a very real sense, that’s how modern societies conceive of medical practice, so much so that healthcare is now frequently experienced as an industrial process: doctors and nurses churning patients through an assembly line.  And that process…

Quality ratings of hospitals and physicians: help or hindrance?  Surely, the general public demands and is entitled to an assessment of hospital quality based on sound methodology.  And ratings coming from the private sector are far more likely to be unbiased and to adjust to an ever changing healthcare landscape than those coming from the…

Two distinguished guests join us to debate the issue of vaccine mandates. Dorit Reiss is Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, California.  She holds an undergraduate degree in Law and Political Science from the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a  PhD in Jurisprudence and…