medical malpractice

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pages: 304 words: 22,886

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

.* In return for a waiver of that right, a doctor, hospital, or insurance carrier could offer a patient a lower price for health care. Some patients would choose to take the lower price and assume the risk themselves. Others would prefer to waive medical malpractice liability and instead buy private disability or injury insurance. But these arrangements aren’t available to patients, because courts have long held that waivers of medical malpractice liability are unenforceable as “against public policy.” These rulings are the opposite of libertarian; they deny people the freedom to make contracts as they see fit. For patients, these legal rulings might sound great, a nice form of protection, and we will soon return to the question of protection.

Would you be angry if you were prevented from doing so? We know, we know, the analogy isn’t perfect, but consider this fact: both health care customers and taxpayers are now forced to help pay for the eighty-five thousand medical malpractice lawsuits that are filed each year.1 These lawsuits cost a lot of money—estimates range from $11 billion to $29 billion per year.2 Exposure to medical malpractice liability has been estimated to account for 5 to 9 percent of hospital expenditures—which means that litigation costs are a contributor to the expense of the health care system.3 Of course these particular figures are controversial and may be exaggerated, but no one doubts that many billions of dollars must be paid each year to buy insurance and to fend off liability.

So even if the risk of liability for negligence actually does reduce the frequency of injuries caused by doctors, these gains could easily be offset by the losses of those who are unable to afford treatment at all.6 Another problem with the current system is that jury awards for the pain and suffering that may be associated with a medical malpractice claim are highly erratic.7 It is difficult to predict, from the facts of the case, whether a plaintiff will get a lot or a little. In medical malpractice cases, people are sometimes awarded “punitive damages,” too, in order to punish the wrongdoer. But punitive damage awards also have a lot of variability.8 So patients are effectively forced to buy a kind of lottery ticket, one that might be worth anything from millions of dollars to nothing, but that is, on average, worth no more than 60 cents for every dollar spent (the rest going to lawyers).


Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande, clean water, discovery of penicillin, facts on the ground, medical malpractice, moral hazard, Oklahoma City bombing, private military company, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh

Kay in Academic Medicine 69 (1995): 842-46. WHAT DOCTORS OWE 87 Much of the detail on the American medical malpractice system comes from research by my colleagues David Studdert, Michelle Mello, and Troy Brennan of the Harvard School of Public Health. See, for example, D. M. Studdert et al., "Negligent Care and Malpractice Claiming Behavior in Utah and Colorado," Medical Care 38 (2000): 250-60, and D. M. Studdert et al., "Claims, Errors, and Compensation Payments in Medical Malpractice Litigation," New England Journal of Medicine 354 (2006): 2024-33. Two excellent reviews of what we know about the American malpractice system are D.

Two excellent reviews of what we know about the American malpractice system are D. M. Studdert, M. M. Mello, T. A. Brennan, "Medical Malpractice," New England Journal of Medicine 350 (2004): 283-92 (that's a short one), and Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) (that's a longer one). 108 For more on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation program, see D. Ridgway's description in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 24 (1999): 59-90, and also the program's Web site, www.hrsa.gov/osp/vicp/. 109 The New Zealand malpractice system is detailed by M. Bismark and R. Paterson in "No-Fault Compensation in New Zealand," Health Affairs 25 (2000): 278-83.

In courtroom 10B, David Santiago was on trial for cocaine trafficking and illegal possession of a deadly weapon. In courtroom 7B, a scheduling conference was being held for Minihan v. Wallinger, a civil claim of motor vehicle negligence. And next door, in courtroom 7A, Dr. Kenneth Reed faced charges of medical malpractice. Reed was a Harvard-trained dermatologist with twenty-one years of experience, and he had never been sued for malpractice before. That day, he was being questioned about two office visits and a phone call that had taken place almost a decade earlier. Barbara Stanley, a fifty-eight-year-old woman, had been referred to him by her internist in the summer of 1996 about a dark warty nodule a quarter-inch wide on her left thigh.


pages: 224 words: 74,599

Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated...Life Behind the O.R. Doors by Paul A. Ruggieri

fear of failure, job satisfaction, Libby Zion, medical malpractice, medical residency

What happens to surgeons who do get judgments against them? Surgeons who lose or settle a medical malpractice suit get their names permanently placed in the secret National Practitioners Data Bank, the N.P.D.B., if the judgment is more than a certain dollar amount. The N.P.D.B. is a government agency created by Congress in 1986 to improve the quality of healthcare. It collects the names of physicians who have been sanctioned by state licensing boards, engaged in unprofessional behavior, or made medical malpractice payments. The information gathered by the N.P.D.B. is not accessible by the public. Hospitals and state licensing boards granting privileges to doctors are the only entities with access to the National Practitioners Data Bank.

Williams’s rehospitalization, however, until the day a certified letter from her attorney arrived. “Dr. Paul Ruggieri and Drs.___________are hereby named as defendants in the lawsuit . . .” I felt like throwing up. The ink on my malpractice policy wasn’t even dry and I was getting sucked into the black hole of a medical malpractice lawsuit. As it turned out, Mrs. Williams had been readmitted to the hospital and endured yet another major operation—to remove the sponge (the cause of the infection) from her abdominal cavity. I wondered how much she knew about the other mistakes made during her hysterectomy, or how close she had come to dying that day.

Lawyers know that doctors loathe being part of a lawsuit. They feed off their distaste for having to take time off to defend themselves. Lawyers know that surgeons detest being forced in front of a jury, having to justify their decisions and the care they gave.” Kathy was educating me on the anatomy of a medical malpractice lawsuit. “The process is cruel. It weeds out the irrelevant physicians, while slowly tightening the noose around the neck of the main accused.” As I was to learn, the process comes at a cost to all, both emotionally and financially. “Dr. Ruggieri, in the end you and the others will be exonerated by the truth.”


pages: 263 words: 78,433

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri

affirmative action, classic study, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, job satisfaction, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, Multics, RAND corporation

Nelson, “Physicians on Trial: Self-Reported Reactions to Malpractice Trials,” Western Journal of Medicine 148 (1988): 358–60. 7. Sara C. Charles and Eugene Kennedy, Defendant: A Psychiatrist on Trial for Medical Malpractice (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 7. 8. Ibid. 9. Charles, “Physicians on Trial”; S. C. Charles, “Sued and Nonsued Physicians’ Self-Reported Reactions to Malpractice Litigation,” American Journal of Psychiatry 142 (1985): 437–40. 10. S. C. Charles, “The Doctor-Patient Relationship and Medical Malpractice Litigation,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 57 (1993): 195–207. 11. S. C. Charles, “Malpractice Suits: Their Effect on Doctors, Patients, and Families,” Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 76 (1987): 171–72. 12.

John Stone, “Gaudeamus Igitur,” Journal of the American Medical Association 249, no. 13 (1983): 1741–42. CHAPTER 7 1. A. Kachalia and D. Studdert, “Professional Liability Issues in Graduate Medical Education,” Journal of the American Medical Association 292 (2004): 1051–56. 2. R. A. Bailey, “Resident Liability in Medical Malpractice,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 61, no. 1 (2013): 114–17. 3. C. K. Kane, “Medical Liability Claim Frequency: A 2007–2008 Snapshot of Physicians,” AMA Policy Research Perspectives, www.ama-assn.org/. 4. A. B. Jena, “Malpractice Risk According to Physician Specialty,” New England Journal of Medicine 365 (2011): 629–36. 5.


Everybody's Guide to Small Claims Court by Ralph E. Warner

benefit corporation, estate planning, fixed income, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, rent control

How the Discovery Rule Works With some types of cases, such as medical malpractice, the limitations period starts from the date the harm was discovered or reasonably should have been discovered. This rule protects people who don’t know they have a problem until well after it has occurred. Example: During an operation, a doctor leaves a small clamp in your abdomen. It isn’t until a year later that you experience extreme pain and see a different doctor, who orders an X-ray that shows the clamp. In most states, the statute of limitations for suits based on medical malpractice (often three years) begins from the date you learn of the problem, not the date of the original operation.

How to Approach a Professional Malpractice Case An increasing number of small claims cases are being filed against doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. The main reason is that it can be difficult or impossible to get lawyers to represent you in a formal court action. (Lawyers accept only one in 20 medical malpractice cases, according to one study.) As a result, the injured person must decide to either file without a lawyer in formal court or scale down the dollar amount of her claim to fit into small claims court. To succeed with a malpractice claim, you must establish all of the following facts: • Duty.

But you will probably need to do further legal research. Even the time limits specified in the following chart can be affected by things like the “Discovery Rule”—see “How the Discovery Rule Works,” below. Also, the time limits in the chart may not cover every situation. For example, claims involving medical malpractice, eviction, child or spousal support, fraud, product liability, consumer sales contracts, or faulty work by builders may all have different statutes of limitations. And, some states distinguish between different types of property (usually real and personal property) when establishing statutes of limitations.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

They thin-sliced. And what happened? The same thing that happened with Gottman: those people with the clipboards were really good at making predictions. 5. Listening to Doctors Let’s take the concept of thin-slicing one step further. Imagine you work for an insurance company that sells doctors medical malpractice protection. Your boss asks you to figure out for accounting reasons who, among all the physicians covered by the company, is most likely to be sued. Once again, you are given two choices. The first is to examine the physicians’ training and credentials and then analyze their records to see how many errors they’ve made over the past few years.

Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them. What is that something else? It’s how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly. “People just don’t sue doctors they like,” is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent.

In fact, the core of the book is research from a very new and quite extraordinary field in psychology that hasn’t really been written about yet for a general audience. But those ideas are illustrated using stories from every corner of society. In just the first four chapters, I discuss, among other things, marriage, World War II code breaking, ancient Greek sculpture, New Jersey’s best car dealer, Tom Hanks, speed-dating, medical malpractice, how to hit a topspin forehand, and what you can learn from someone by looking around their bedroom. So what does that make Blink? Fun, I hope. What do you want people to take away from Blink? I guess I just want to get people to take rapid cognition seriously. When it comes to something like dating, we all readily admit to the importance of what happens in the first instant when two people meet.


pages: 422 words: 114,817

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable by Joanna Schwartz

Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, George Floyd, Jeffrey Epstein, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, Ronald Reagan

The limits on attorneys’ fees in Section 1983 cases not only discourage lawyers from taking risky or low-damages cases; they also may lead lawyers to stop bringing civil rights cases altogether. Most lawyers who bring civil rights cases are jacks of many trades whose case dockets include personal injury, medical malpractice, or criminal defense cases. In fact, many lawyers I interviewed brought their first Section 1983 case without appreciating its financial risks. Someone came into their office with an infuriating story of unjust treatment at the hands of government officials, and they accepted that first case despite not really knowing how to litigate civil rights cases at all.

An attorney from Florida who used to bring only police misconduct cases now takes on dental malpractice cases with the hopes that “the dental stuff perhaps will pay some bills.” An attorney from Pennsylvania who used to focus primarily on Section 1983 cases now spends most of his time on personal injury and medical malpractice cases, which he considers “easier work that pays a lot more money.” Section 1988 was intended to encourage lawyers to bring cases vindicating constitutional rights that are important, even if they are worth relatively little in the way of compensable damages. But the current scheme means that a lawyer will likely only take this kind of case for the principle.

About ten years before he met Liese, Ruffier represented his first plaintiff in a civil rights case—someone who was arrested and assaulted by police in a manner too outrageous to turn away, in Ruffier’s mind. By the time he met Liese, Ruffier was spending about a quarter of his time on civil rights cases and the rest on personal injury and medical malpractice cases. He was and remains very particular about the civil rights cases he takes and generally will not represent someone who has ever been arrested or spent time in jail for fear that Florida judges and juries will not be sympathetic to their claims. Ruffier violated this rule of thumb when he accepted Rob Liese’s case.


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The medical profession itself is in jeopardy, for insurers are increasingly unwilling to offer medical liability insurance, even at astronomical rates. In January of 2003, thirty-nine West Virginia surgeons went on strike to protest rising medical malpractice insurance and the fact that most insurers in the state, recognizing the excessive risk that so many frivolous lawsuits create, do not even offer medical malpractice insurance.16 Liability insurance is not just a problem for the medical profession, however; day-care centers and many other industries find such insurance to be more and more difficult to secure. The “liability crisis” has also stifled innovation in numerous industries, since newer products carry with them more risk of lawsuits than do old, tried-and-true products.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

Lee and her colleagues found that the companies that owned up to their mistakes in public had higher stock prices a year later than those that tried to bury them. Inspired by Lee’s work, Ben Ho looked for other ways to establish a link between apologies and economic outcomes. Together with his colleague Elaine Liu, he looked at the way that medical malpractice is handled in the United States. When doctors make mistakes that harm their patients, they can get caught in a bind. On the one hand, presuming they are honest, they want to apologise. On the other, by doing so they expose themselves to the threat of a ruinous legal action. Now, imagine what it is like to be a patient who does not get an apology from a doctor who has made your life, or the life of someone you love, unnecessarily painful.

., ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’, Behavioral and Brain Science, 33 (2–3), June 2010, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X Herman, Arthur, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World, Fourth Estate, 2003 Ho, Benjamin, and Liu, Elaine, ‘Does Sorry Work? The Impact of Apology Laws on Medical Malpractice’, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 43 (2), June 201 Hoffman, Jan, ‘How Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Took Hold in the United States’, New York Times, 23 September 2019 Horowitz, Ben, The Hard Thing about Hard Things, HarperCollins USA, 2014 Hughes, Bettany, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life, Vintage 2011 Huthwaite International, The Behaviour of Successful Negotiators Ickes, William, Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel, Prometheus Books, 2006 Jacobs, Alan, How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed, Profile, 2017 Jaidker, K., Zhou, A., Lelkes, Y., ‘Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion’, Journal of Communication, 69 (4), August 2019 Janis, Irving L., Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Houghton Mifflin, 1972 Jhaver, S., Vora, P., Bruckman, A., ‘Designing for Civil Conversations: Lessons Learned from ChangeMyView’, GVU Technical Report, December 2017 Kahan, Dan, ‘Ideology, motivated reasoning and cognitive reflection’, Judgement and Decision-Making, 8 (4), July 2013 Kahan, Dan, et al., ‘Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing’, Advances in Political Psychology, 38 (S1), February 2017 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Penguin 2012 Kaplan, Jonas T., Gimbel, Sarah I., Harris, Sam, ‘Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence’, Scientific Reports 6 (1), 2016, https://doi.org/10.1038.srep39589 Kim, D., Pan, Y., Park, H.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The heads of both the House and the Senate Judiciary committees—John Conyers in the House and Pat Leahy in the Senate—decided to introduce amendments to the various health care bills (which did not address the issue originally) that would have repealed one tiny little slice of McCarran-Ferguson. “Both amendments only pertained to the health insurance industry and the medical malpractice insurance industry,” says Erica Chabot, an aide to Senator Leahy. “And not only that,” says Martin. “Not only did they not repeal the exemption for all other types of insurance, but they also included a provision that said, basically, that this repeal only applies to price-fixing, bid-rigging, and market allocation.

“Not only did they not repeal the exemption for all other types of insurance, but they also included a provision that said, basically, that this repeal only applies to price-fixing, bid-rigging, and market allocation. Anything that didn’t fall into those categories, those were still legal.” So, really, Leahy and Conyers were trying to score one small victory: instead of establishing primacy over the entire insurance industry, they merely wanted to pass laws making it illegal for health or medical malpractice insurers to fix prices, rig bids for contracts, or divide up markets among themselves. They didn’t even attempt to broadly outlaw unfair anticompetitive practices. “But what if, for instance, an insurer says, ‘You can’t buy this product unless you also buy this other product’? Is that covered or not covered?”


pages: 286 words: 92,521

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

With rare exceptions, bloodletting was harmful to the patient, and yet the practice continued, supported by tradition, “expertise,” and humans’ ability to ignore data that doesn’t fit their underlying assumptions. If the patient recovered after a good bloodletting, it was further evidence for the utility of bloodletting. If they did not… well, they certainly would have died anyway. It is quite possible that George Washington died of this medical malpractice, as his physicians removed 3.75 liters of blood from his body to cure a throat infection. This represents around 75 percent of the total blood volume of a typical adult male. He expired shortly after the procedure, on Saturday, December 14, 1799. When a patient asks for a treatment that is not causally linked to the outcome we are trying to achieve, a physician is obligated to refuse.

Kaiser Family Foundation, November 21, 2018, https://www.kff.org/other/slide/how-do-americans-cope-with-loneliness. 6 It could be, though; there is: Aaron Lazare, “Apology in Medical Practice: An Emerging Clinical Skill,” JAMA 296, no. 11 (September 20, 2006): 1401–04, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.296.11.1401. 7 These laws are rather weak and probably: Benjamin J. McMichael, R. Lawrence Van Horn, and W. Kip Viscusi, “‘Sorry’ Is Never Enough: How State Apology Laws Fail to Reduce Medical Malpractice Liability Risk,” Stanford Law Review 71, no. 2 (February 2019): 341–409, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2883693. About the Author F. PERRY WILSON grew up in Connecticut before attending Harvard University, where he graduated with honors in biochemistry. He then attended medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before completing his internship, residency, and fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.


pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

Ignagni and her members feared that the country might soon be beset with New York–style “reform.” So in June 2008, Ignagni convinced her members to put together a more detailed reform proposal than the one AHIP had first espoused about six months earlier. Along with cost-cutting initiatives, such as electronic medical records and tort reform to curb medical malpractice suits that were thought to encourage doctors to practice expensive defensive medicine, Ignagni’s plan called for universal coverage that would include “limits” on excluding people with preexisting conditions, accompanied by a mandate that everyone had to buy insurance. Moreover, federally financed subsidies would be offered to people who needed help paying the premiums.

That was the most far reaching—and, given the lobbying clout that would be arrayed against it—the most far-fetched idea that DeParle included. However, DeParle had left out what the economic team considered to be some of the more important game changers, but ones that more left-of-center reformers had always been wary of: medical malpractice reform, tough penalties for hospitals with high patient readmission rates, and a push to allow hospitals and doctors to consolidate their services into “bundled payments.” Emanuel and Kocher also wanted to add estimates of the savings that could come with each. DeParle and Lambrew refused.

Which meant not only freedom from political influence but also freedom from having to do its job the way people in the real world did. THE DEMOCRATS AND THE TRIAL LAWYERS In the same meeting in which the White House staff decided to take the doc fix out of the bill, they discussed another issue that the doctors cared about: medical malpractice tort reform. Like many healthcare and legal policy analysts, the economic team believed that trial lawyers were abusing the courts by suing doctors too often for bad outcomes rather than bad treatment. Making it harder for doctors to be sued successfully would cut spending because it would lessen the practice of defensive medicine.


pages: 320 words: 97,509

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

I was infuriated, not only by the precarious position in which we now found ourselves but also because I was sure that the unfounded fear of a lawsuit was at least partially driving the anesthesiologist’s decision. Nearly half of all anesthesiologists, and almost 100 percent of physicians in high-risk specialties such as neurosurgery, cardiology, and obstetrics, will face a medical malpractice claim at some point in their careers. Malpractice litigation is often the most stressful experience in a doctor’s professional life. Most doctors do not discuss it with colleagues or even with family members; it is a hidden shame. And though I might have sympathized with the anesthesiologist if I’d been on the other side of the doctor-patient dyad, none of this mattered to me as my pregnant wife lay on a gurney.

In part because of my own experience with Sonia and the baby, I have come to believe that doctors should deny treatment requests judiciously—and rarely. A surgeon might understandably refuse to operate on someone whose religious beliefs proscribe blood transfusions on the ground that he would not want to be forced into medical malpractice. But in cases with reasonable differences of opinion, in which the competing risks are at least debatable, it seems unfair and unwise to me to deny a patient’s choice. (If patient autonomy means anything, then patients have the right to make bad decisions, too.) Was Sonia’s anesthesiologist being virtuous or knavish?


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

It has been overwhelmingly pro-gun control and anti-death penalty; sympathetic to the homeless and the ecosystem; alert to child abuse, spousebattering, alcoholism, sexual discrimination and/or harassment, date-rape and medical malpractice . . . And television may be the only American institution outside public school to still believe in and celebrate the integration of the races, at least on camera.4 What is not on Leonard’s list is telling: TV tackles medical malpractice but not the systemic inequalities in access to health care; overt racial discrimination, but not structural racism or discrimination according to wealth and social class; individual suffering, but not the social policies that contribute to it.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Donabedian, “The End Results of Health Care: Ernest Codman’s Contribution to Quality Assessment and Beyond,” Milbank Quarterly, 67:245 (1989). 37 The earliest malpractice cases K. A. DeVille, Medical Malpractice in Nineteenth-Century America: Origins and Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 37 “Even the most egregious Quacks” N. Smith, “Medical Jurisprudence,” lecture notes taken by A. J. Skelton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Medical School, 1827), cited in J. C. Mohr, “American Medical Malpractice Litigation in Historical Perspective,” Journal of the American Medical Association 283:1731–1737 (2000). 37 since malpractice verdicts turned on evidence S.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Ritter, Kristy Crooks, Erin Currey, Stephanie M. Fullerton, Lucia A. Hindorff, Barbara Koenig, et al., “The Clinical Imperative for Inclusivity: Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry (REA) in Genomics,” Human Mutation 39, no. 11 (2018): 1713–1720. 22. Tom Baker, The Medical Malpractice Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Alex Stein, “Toward a Theory of Medical Malpractice,” Iowa Law Review 97 (2012): 1201–1258. 23. Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 32. 24. LeighAnne Olsen, J. Michael McGuinnis, and Dara Alsner, eds., Learning Healthcare System: Workshop Summary (Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine, 2007). 25.


pages: 169 words: 43,906

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income by Jeff Hunt

buy low sell high, content marketing, deal flow, Donald Trump, drop ship, frictionless, frictionless market, intangible asset, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Skype, software as a service

On each page of the website, there was an invitation for the reader to enter his or her name and mailing address to be sent a free information packet with more extensive information about the medical condition. The website owner sent out approximately thirty of those information packets per month. He sold those thirty leads to a medical malpractice attorney for $125 each. The attorney was happy to buy 360 leads a year for a few potential cases that could yield millions of dollars in legal fees. Recapping from an earlier story, a magician was selling his website that showcased his talents and invited visitors to schedule him for magic shows at birthday parties and corporate events.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

The website OpenPGP (www.openpgp.org) lists a range of software to get you up and running, including the popular Gpg4win for Windows and GPGTools for Mac. And if you’re a whistleblower, it’s worth remembering: snail mail remains among the best ways to leak material to a journalist. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times received a brown envelope containing almost a hundred pages of sealed court and other documents that revealed possible medical malpractice in the death of Neil Armstrong, the first human on the moon. Even if you don’t foresee a need for encrypted communications, it’s worth making sure online predators aren’t using email as a phishing rod into your life. Avoid following links and opening files from untrusted senders. If you must open a suspicious attachment, experts recommend that you do it in Google Docs, so any infections don’t end up on your computer.


pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

The evidence from the bits and pieces is given credibility by its consistency with the findings of the meta-analyses, but if nonetheless the bits and pieces are misleading it should be easy to prove. The archives of city and state agencies, legal and medical professional organizations, and the federal government contain voluminous data on bar examinations and medical board certifications, on legal and medical malpractice, on police performance ratings, on teachers’ ratings, and on performance measures for other occupations requiring licensing or monitoring. There’s no shortage of evidence that could confirm or refute my presentation. That evidence just hasn’t been made available for public examination. As for the occupations that don’t require licensing or monitoring, every major corporation in the country has detailed records on job performance.


pages: 436 words: 123,488

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine by John Abramson

disinformation, germ theory of disease, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, p-value, placebo effect, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Howard, author of The Collapse of the Common Good: How America’s Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom, commented that most of the doctors who do commit malpractice are not sued, and most of the lawsuits brought against doctors are about situations in which malpractice was not committed. Nonetheless, the current medical malpractice system consistently distorts our medical care. Doctors are aware of the risk of a malpractice suit lurking in every patient visit. Three-fifths of doctors in the United States admit that they do more diagnostic testing than is necessary because of the threat of litigation. And why not? The risk of ordering an extra test is nil, but the threat of a lawsuit because of a test not ordered is ever present—even when the likelihood of serious disease is very low and reasonable professional judgment would say the test was not necessary.

Clinical guidelines provide expert review of the research and allow doctors to be confident that their decisions regarding patient care reflect the best available scientific evidence. Guidelines also provide benchmarks by which the quality of a doctor’s care can be evaluated, and (always lurking in the background of a doctor’s thoughts) they are admissible as evidence of the accepted standards of care in medical malpractice cases. A study published in JAMA in 1999 evaluating the quality of the guidelines showed, ironically, that they often fall short of established standards. The following year The Lancet published a report that found that only one out of 20 clinical guidelines examined met established standards of quality for three simple criteria: description of the professionals involved in formulating the guidelines; description of the sources of information used to find the relevant scientific evidence; and grading of the evidence used to support the main recommendations.


pages: 234 words: 53,078

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

The issue of takings comes up often, but not exclusively, in the context of environmental regulation. For example, if the government prohibits building in a forest because it threatens the habitat of an endangered species, this usually reduces the value of the land. Similarly, in an effort to protect wetlands, the 5 For example, a recent study found that the cost of defending medical malpractice cases in the United States was less than 0.5 percent of total health care spending. This figure was comparable to the costs in England, New Zealand, and Australia, all countries with much lower total health care expenditures, see Anderson et al. (2005). 72 federal government has placed restrictions on the uses of land in some areas.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

In addition to being accepted by a body of medical practitioners, the practice must not be in the opinion of the court, unreasonable, illogical or indefensible. 36For discussion of this problem in medical liability, see Shailin Thomas, “Artificial Intelligence, Medical Malpractice, and the End of Defensive Medicine”, Harvard Law Bill of Health blog, 26 January 2017, http://​blogs.​harvard.​edu/​billofhealth/​2017/​01/​26/​artificial-intelligence-medical-malpractice-and-the-end-of-defensive-medicine/​ (Part I), and http://​blogs.​harvard.​edu/​billofhealth/​2017/​02/​10/​artificial-intelligence-and-medical-liability-part-ii/​ (Part II), accessed 1 June 2018. 37See Curtis E.A.


pages: 194 words: 59,488

Frommer's Memorable Walks in London by Richard Jones

Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Snow's cholera map, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, moral panic

Walk counterclockwise around the square and pause outside: 23. 35 Bedford Square, the former home of Thomas Wakley (1795–1862), a surgeon and friend of Charles Dickens who founded The Lancet, England’s most prestigious medical journal. Wakley started the periodical in 120 • Memorable Walks in London order to criticize medical malpractice and nepotism, an endeavor that involved him in numerous libel actions. While serving as coroner for the West Middlesex Hospital, Wakley often allowed Dickens to attend his examinations—providing Dickens with plenty of fodder for his novels. As you continue walking around the square, take note of the house at: 24. 42 Bedford Square.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Svorny, “Beyond Medical Licensure,” Regulation, Spring 2015, pp. 26–29. 31.See Shirley Svorny, “Medical Licensing: An Obstacle to Affordable, Quality Care,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 621, September 17, 2008, p. 7. 32.See Svorny, “Medical Licensing”; Shirley Svorny, “Could Mandatory Caps on Medical Malpractice Damages Harm Consumers?” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 685, October 20, 2011; Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, “Defensive Medicine and Disappearing Doctors?” Regulation, Fall 2005, pp. 24–31. 33.Adriana D. Kugler and Robert M. Sauer, “Doctors without Borders? Relicensing Requirements and Negative Selection in the Market for Physicians,” Journal of Labor Economics 23, no. 3 (July 2005): 437–66. 34.Miriam J.


pages: 201 words: 67,347

Attempting Normal by Marc Maron

back-to-the-land, desegregation, medical malpractice, planned obsolescence, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live

“Thinking out of the box is a learned process that should be next to godliness in the priorities in what to teach your children. The trick is to recognize when the box, itself, is faulty and deserving change.” Barry Maron while watching and hearing a jury of 12 peers in Oklahoma make a decision in a medical malpractice case against a loser doctor. Shades of the OJ jury nullification. In case you aren’t reading carefully, he just quoted himself in this card. For Mother’s Day, of course. Enjoy the late great United States of America as it morphs into the Socialist USA. Words cannot help if all reasonable actions have failed.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

See also MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity Mass customization, 44, 45 Mass production, 6-7,15,17-25, 35, 39; in aircraft industry, 36; history of, 18-19; inculcated in U.S. manufacturing, 172; Japanese methods, 38, 40; and metal working industries, 19; new incarnation of, 5, 6, 7, 170-71; and service industries, 7,16,17,171,186 McCain, John, 185 McCormick, Don, 96-97 McCormick reapers, 22 McGrath, Mike, 108 McKinsey Global Institute, 54-57 MCOs. See Managed care organizations Measurement of work, 66-67. See also Scientific management; Tac (time allowed for completion of job); Time-and-motion studies 219 INDEX Medical malpractice, 141 Medical reengineering, 5,13, 117-52; effect on medical schools and teaching hospitals, 127-29,149; elimination of office visits, 133; failure of, 177; medical databases, use of, 130-33; outpatient care as focus of, 128; physician and/or public resistance to, 9,119-21, 177,184; software to support, 171; team structure and, 133; telephone triage, use of, 126; usual vs. planned medicine, 131,142.


pages: 268 words: 76,709

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, low interest rates, McMansion, medical malpractice, old-boy network, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

One of the social workers helping Carlitos’s parents realized that the family faced an insurmountable financial burden and needed legal help. The social worker contacted a local lawyer, who confessed that he would have been completely over his head with such a complex case. He did, however, have a colleague who specialized in catastrophic personal injury, product liability, and medical malpractice litigation. He picked up the telephone and put in a call to Andrew Yaffa, a partner in the firm Grossman Roth, which has offices in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Sarasota, and Key West. Although they had no way of knowing it, Abraham Candelario, Francisca Herrera, and Carlitos had just caught what might have been the first break they had ever received in their hardscrabble lives.


pages: 249 words: 73,731

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business by Bob Lutz

An Inconvenient Truth, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, flex fuel, Ford Model T, medical malpractice, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, scientific management, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, Toyota Production System, transfer pricing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, value engineering

Health care costs grew and grew, accelerated, as always, by America’s unique “contingent fee” legal system, whereby the penniless victim can see justice done by hiring a lawyer who is willing to help “for free” in exchange for a percentage of a possible settlement. Noble intent, but that’s not how it turned out. In a classic example of the law of unintended consequences at work, “medical malpractice” (along with “personal injury” in general) became an ever more powerful branch of the legal profession, with active solicitation—in fact, aggressive searches—for possible new “victims” who could be lucratively “assisted.” Trial lawyers like to point out that all this is untrue, that only a small portion of America’s health care bill is accounted for by settlements, but, while technically true, that misses the point.


pages: 223 words: 77,566

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, late fees, medical malpractice, obamacare, off-the-grid, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, working poor

“Well,” she said, pausing for a moment to reflect, “then get your hands on some arsenic. That way no one will know.” Her back surgery, it turned out, was completely unnecessary. She had a broken hip, and as soon as a surgeon repaired it, she was back on her feet, though she used a walker or cane from then on. Now that I’m a lawyer, I marvel that we never considered a medical malpractice suit against the doctor who operated unnecessarily on her back. But Mamaw wouldn’t have allowed it: She didn’t believe in using the legal system until you had to. Sometimes I’d see Mom every few days, and sometimes I’d go a couple of weeks without hearing from her at all. After one breakup, she spent a few months on Mamaw’s couch, and we both enjoyed her company.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Study after study shows that what many patients want after being the victim of a medical mistake is not a lump sum payment or the physician’s head on a plate. What they really crave is what FedEx delivered in the wake of that package-tossing incident: a sincere apology, a full explanation of how the error occurred and a clear plan to ensure the same thing will not happen again. Among patients who file a suit for medical malpractice in the United States, nearly 40 per cent say they might not have done so had the attending physician explained and apologized for the mishap. The trouble is, many in the medical profession are too proud or too scared to say sorry. Those that do so reap the benefits. In the late 1980s the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky became the first hospital in the United States to tap the power of the mea culpa.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

Consequently, it is more usual to think of bots as having "control over their own actions and their own internal state," as one account puts it.30 While it might solve the problem of blind obedience, this autonomy raises problems of its own. If bots make decisions and give advice autonomously, who takes responsibility for those decisions? Can Eliza be sued for medical malpractice? And if not, should the programmer be sued instead? Can Shallow Red be sued for business malpractice? And if not, who should be sued, the programmer or the company that the chatterbot represents? If the owner of a bot should take responsibility for those actions, then that owner must have some control over and insight into them.


pages: 294 words: 85,811

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid

Berlin Wall, British Empire, double helix, employer provided health coverage, fudge factor, Kenneth Arrow, medical malpractice, profit maximization, profit motive, single-payer health, South China Sea, the payments system

., “Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis,” Health Affairs, January/February 2008, p. 71. 5 The Commonwealth Fund, Multinational Comparisons of Health Systems Data, November 2006. 6 Schoen et al., “U.S. Health System Performance.” 7 Ibid. 8 Patricia Danzon,“Liability for Medical Malpractice,” Handbook of Health Economics, vol. 1B (Burlington, Ma.: Elsevier, 2000), chapter 26. 9 For example, see “UnitedHealth Slashes Forecast,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2008, p. B4; PULSE (newsletter), September 2005, p. 1. 10 An ace reporter, Lisa Girion of the Los Angeles Times, has reported in depth on the industry’s selection practices.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Theories like these help people grapple with feelings of powerlessness by positioning other human beings, with agendas and motivations, as responsible for medical conditions. In doing so, believers can avoid the uncomfortable truth: that life and death can lie with something like a virus, which cannot be voted out of office or sued for medical malpractice. Miracle cures, meanwhile, treat the other side of conspiratorial health beliefs, falsely claiming to be the real solution to an ailment—the one that governments or pharmaceutical companies allegedly try to hide. One modern conspiracy kingpin, for example, sells a book claiming you can beat diabetes with a secret cure that doctors hide because “drug companies would much prefer to keep you dependent on insulin and diabetes drugs.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." 4 Daniel Yankelovich and Isabella Furth (2005, September 16), "The Role of Colleges in an Era of Mistrust," The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B8—B11. Quote on p. B11. 5 Posted on the Web site of an advocacy group called The Sorry Works!, a coalition of physicians, hospital administrators, insurers, patients, and others concerned with the medical malpractice crisis. At Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and several other medical schools, residents are learning how to acknowledge mistakes and apologize for them, as well as how to distinguish a bad outcome that is not their fault from one that is. See Katherine Mangan, "Acting Sick," The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2006. 6 Richard A.


pages: 292 words: 94,324

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

., "Variability in radiologists' interpretations of mammograms," NEJM 331 (1994), pp. 1493–1499; Yulei Jiang et al., "Potential of computer-aided diagnosis to reduce variability in radiologists' interpretations of mammograms depicting microcalcifications," Radiology 220 (2001), pp. 787–794; Daniel B. Kopans, "Mammography screening is saving thousands of lives, but will it survive medical malpractice?," Radiology 230 (2004), pp. 20–24. More detail about Kundel's studies, particularly his seminal work, is found in his article in the Journal of the American College of Radiology cited above, as well as in G. Revesz and H. L. Kundel, "Psychophysical studies of detection errors in chest radiology," Radiology 123 (1977), pp. 559–562.


pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Private operatives, lawyers, and crisis management experts have little interest in transparency, so they often cloak their open records requests by laundering them through a contractor to make it appear that an inquiry is coming from someone else. For its part, Fusion GPS had long employed a former journalist who was an expert on open records laws as a contractor. That ex-reporter, Russell Carollo, had spent many years at the Dayton Daily News, where he had won numerous awards including a Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing medical malpractice by military doctors. He had a reputation for being cantankerous and once told a colleague that he didn’t just burn his bridges, he “blew them up.” By the late 2000s, Carollo had run through a series of newspapers and was having difficulty finding a job. He faced another challenge. He was diagnosed with early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

The founders’ letter in the S1 declared that the company strove to provide users “with great commercial information.” The financial win here was that a significant percentage of searches on Google (perhaps a third) did have commercial intent—for example, how can I find the cheapest flights to Houston, where can I buy a baseball catcher’s mitt, how can I hire a good medical malpractice lawyer. And there were many marketers who were keen to pay to advertise directly against those searches. There are two key points that help explain why Google has always faced such an enormous TAM—and premium revenue growth—opportunity. First, Google dramatically eased people’s access to information.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

The public may insist that the police record themselves in the course of their work. And the police could be all for it, to guard against claims of brutality or abuse on one hand and as an aid in gathering better evidence on the other. Some police forces are already videorecording all arrests. This sort of record won't affect just the police. Medical malpractice insurance might be cheaper, or only available, for doctors who record surgical procedures or even office visits. Bus, taxi, and trucking companies have an obvious interest in the performance of their drivers. Some transportation companies have already installed equipment to record mileage and average speed.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Abel and C. Page. New York: Van Nostrand. Lazear, Edward P. 2000. “Performance Pay and Productivity.” American Economic Review 90 (5):1346–61. Lazer, David, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, et al. 2009. “Social Science: Computational Social Science.” Science 323 (5915):721. Leonhardt, David. 2009. “Medical Malpractice System Breeds More Waste.” New York Times, Sept. 22. ———. 2010. “Saving Energy, and Its Cost.” New York Times, June 15. Lerner, Josh. 2009. Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed—and What to Do About It: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS The question is, has America—weakened by affluenza—slipped down the hierarchy in the last thirty years? It seems the rungs of Maslow’s ladder have become coated with slippery oil, as in a cartoon. According to polls, we’re more fearful now. We’re more insecure about crime, the possible loss of our jobs, and catastrophic illness. More than fifty thousand Americans die every year from medical malpractice, making us all the more insecure about our health. How can we meet intrinsic community needs when sprawl creates distances between people? How can we feel a sense of beauty, security, and balance if beautiful open spaces in our communities are being smothered by new shopping malls and rows of identical houses?


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

We know that the Germans and the Scandinavians maintain high wages and high productivity through a social contract that gives workers a stake in success. We know that they finance their public investments through higher taxes. We know that they produce better students by investing in high-quality teachers and schools. We know that they avoid the mountain of lawsuits and medical malpractice insurance with government-managed health care and social services that do not require you to hire a lawyer in order to pay your doctor bills and feed your family while you recover. The problem is not that Americans “have resisted this approach” because we are too xenophobic to accept ideas from elsewhere.


The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alvin Roth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business cycle, compensation consultant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Garrett Hardin, global village, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Network effects, positional goods, prisoner's dilemma, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Shoshana Zuboff, Stephen Hawking, stock buybacks, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy

Tort-related earnings of attorneys thus depend on the number of suits filed, the probability of winning, and the average damages awarded. The years since 1960 have seen large increases in all three. Thus cases in which products were blamed for injuries increased fourfold between 1 976 and 1986, and in the decade ending in 1 987 more medical malpractice suits were filed than in the entire previous history of American tort law. Damage claims against cities doubled be­ tween 1 982 and 1986. Between 1 984 and 1985 alone, claims filed against the federal government grew by 30 percent. The plaintiff 's probability of winning, which was between 20 and 30 percent for product-liability cases in the 1 960s, had grown to more than 50 per­ cent by the 1980s.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Madoff, Bernard Malaysia: economic growth of export-led growth strategy of investment in managed capitalism: in Asia challenges of export-led growth strategies and investment and success of Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees markets. See capitalism; financial markets; housing market; prices; stock market marriage McCarthy, Nolan Medicaid medical care. See health care; physicians medical malpractice Medicare Merrill Lynch Mexico: conditional cash transfers financial crisis of Mian, Atif microcredit middle class migration mobility: economic factors restricting of workers models, economic Mohamad, Mahathir monetary policy: credit expansion and financial stability and housing market and improvements in Japanese Keynesian lags in political influences on reforms of of United States, See also central banks; interest rates money-market funds moral hazard Morgan, J.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

They all said the same thing, in increasingly threatening tones: he needed to come back to the office, let Mona delete the emails from his personal email account, and sign the affidavit. Or else the company would sue him. Alan realized that they weren’t going to stop. He needed a lawyer. Contacts with that Washington firm had gone nowhere. He needed someone local he could consult in person. He called the first listing that came up in a Google search: a medical malpractice and personal injury attorney in San Francisco. She agreed to represent him after he paid her a ten-thousand-dollar retainer. As his new lawyer saw it, Alan didn’t have much of a choice. Theranos could make a case that his actions did breach his confidential obligations. And even if it failed to do so, it could tie him up in court for months, if not years.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

One lady just dropped dead after a hangnail came free and got stuck in her lung.” One time, when I went to the doctor to treat a scratched cornea from trying to get a contact lens out, I was cautioned that we could not rule out blindness as a result of the incident. For all of these circumspect admonishments, far more people in the United States die of medical malpractice every year than from hangnails or scraped up eyeballs. To make matters worse, the cost of this care is absolutely out of control. My bill for having my eye checked out topped $500. “Can’t be too careful,” they say. If you were to listen to my Thai doctor, maybe you can be. Meanwhile, in many countries with socialized medicine, wait times are so ridiculous that many patients are simply opting to go elsewhere for care, or paying out of pocket for private care.


Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

New Resistance and Organizing Against the School of Shock While attending law school in Boston, Shain threw themselves into challenging JRC, confronting Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick about JRC during a public appearance, authoring two papers on legal strategies 202 S. M. Neumeier and L. X. Z. Brown to stop JRC, leading a session at the annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference, and giving an invited presentation at the Symposium on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Autism Research. In April 2012, Shain attended nearly the entire medical malpractice trial against JRC for torturing Andre McCollins, sitting only feet behind Matthew Israel while taking painstaking notes for the public [14–20]. During that trial, video of JRC’s shocks first aired publicly. Shain also began working with troubled teen industry survivors, including with the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY).


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Fred Baron, who had made a fortune litigating asbestos cases and had given a big chunk of it to the Democrats, most notably to John Edwards, was a longtime resident of Preston Hollow before his death in October 2008. Not far from Bush lives Les Weisbrod, who advertises himself as the “pitbull” of Texas’s medical malpractice bar and is among the larger Democratic donors in Texas. Other major Democratic donors in Preston Hollow include Charles Siegal, a partner at Waters & Kraus; Terrell Oxford, with the liberal firm of Susman Godfrey; and Steven Baron (no relation to Fred), with Baron & Budd. A few hundred miles away, in the richer and more famous Texas neighborhood of River Oaks, Houston, the picture is much the same.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

The complaints that American lawyers had made about the futility of bringing legal proceedings in Nevis were incomprehensible, she said. ‘US lawyers were involved in the drafting of our legislation, so it’s most surprising. Most surprising.’ Didn’t some of the island’s provisions make it hard for women to get a fair divorce settlement, or for victims of medical malpractice to seek recompense? I continued. Wasn’t it disproportionate to expect people to front up a $100,000 bond just to bring a case in the Nevis court? ‘Some countries are very litigious. If you can get a little burn on your hand, because you spill a McDonald’s coffee, somebody will sue you, so this was there to make sure that persons are protected, and we do not have the jurisdiction of our court being bombarded with frivolous law suits,’ she said.


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

Others that had appeared before 1938 were grandfathered . . . though hardly any qualify any longer, since one provision of the Kefauver-Harris Amendments required that it be identical to the version on sale in 1962. * The first use of the term seems to be no older than 1957, when it formed part of the argument in a medical malpractice case. * Her instinct to lecture drug companies on moral as well as scientific grounds soon made her as notorious among pharmaceutical companies as she was lionized by the general public. * Not without controversy. When Burroughs announced the initial price for a year’s treatment with AZT—a then-unthinkable $10,000—they were vilified in the press as profiteering monsters


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

All of my ideas about prudent use of time and effort and intent were subsumed by the way this ecosystem worked, and only because for the first time in my entire adult life my days were wide open, so I could pay attention to the kinds of forces in nature that made me question how much intention really matters, if the world is so old and has gone on without us for much of that time. Instead of intent, the land and my own life seemed to be asking for presence. It was getting on in the season. An unexpected windfall came through to us when Dan settled out of court on a medical malpractice case from four years earlier—from when he was still in the coma—and suddenly we had enough cash to pay off a significant portion of our student loans, making our debt-to-income ratio, for the first time since we were each eighteen, such that we could apply for a mortgage on my adjunct income alone.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

“I can’t imagine another disease on the planet where if somebody didn’t get better, everybody in their life would abandon them,” said Olt’s program director, Chris Schaffner. “Imagine having cancer and chemo, and everyone in your family going, ‘Fuck it.’ The idea that you have to hit bottom [before you can get better]—that’s medical malpractice.” Barnard, the outreach peer, was focusing on a new homeless encampment next to a Peoria bridge that had sprung up at the site of comedian Richard Pryor’s childhood home. She was blanketing the area with Narcan and using an online sex worker site to reach out to women who needed help with housing and harm-reduction supplies.


pages: 370 words: 114,741

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

23andMe, Adam Curtis, air freight, company town, desegregation, index card, indoor plumbing, life extension, medical malpractice, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, white picket fence

They also don’t know how or when he learned about Henrietta’s cells. What they do remember is that one day Cofield called Deborah, saying he was a lawyer and that she needed to protect herself and her mother by copyrighting the name Henrietta Lacks. He also said he believed Hopkins was guilty of medical malpractice, and that it was time to sue for the family’s cut of all the money Henrietta’s cells had earned since the fifties, a percentage of which he would take as his fee. He would charge nothing up front, and the Lackses wouldn’t have to pay if he didn’t win. Deborah had never heard about needing to copyright anything, but the family had always thought they should talk to a lawyer about the cells, and Cofield sounded like one they could afford.


pages: 390 words: 125,082

Years of the City by Frederik Pohl

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, pattern recognition

Two weeks ago I was revived, treated and discharged. I have since learned that, through an error in record-keeping, I received not only the treatments proper to my case but also an entire series that had been intended for another occupant of the freezer, also revived at that time. As this is a clear example of medical malpractice, resulting in grave physical and mental harm—” “Hold it a minute, chotz,” said Angel, his voice thin and reedy because he was doing several things at once and could manage only a narrow-band communication. “Where’s this other person?” Margov said gravely, “He has disappeared.” “Ah, come on.


pages: 597 words: 119,204

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, bounce rate, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, information retrieval, iterative process, Kickstarter, machine readable, medical malpractice, Network effects, OSI model, performance metric, power law, satellite internet, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, Steve Jobs, the long tail, three-martini lunch, traumatic brain injury, web application

Although you can separate keywords with a comma or a space, omitting commas will give you more proximity hits between adjacent terms. Use lowercase text to better match search queries and for better compressibility. For example: <meta name="keywords" content="orlando florida personal injury lawyer, central florida personal injury attorneys, florida medical malpractice lawyers, orlando injury attorneys, orange county automobile accident attorney, personal injuries central florida, orlando law firm"> Avoid repeating your keywords in the same form more than three times. It is best to vary your terms using stems, plurals, splits, and misspellings. Warning Avoid using the trademarks and brand names of other companies in your keywords.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Liabilities aren’t meant to be a black-and-white, all-or-nothing means of government intervention. Regularly, the law establishes carve-outs from liability in some circumstances. This happened in the 1980s, when the small-aircraft industry was almost bankrupted because of excessive liability judgments. There could also be caps on damages, as there are for some medical malpractice claims, although we need to be careful that any caps don’t undermine the desired incentives of liabilities. And while it’s clear that software manufacturers don’t deserve 100% of the liability for a security incident, it is equally clear that they don’t deserve 0%. Courts can figure this out.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

As the examples we give suggest, ignorance about what we buy and use is commonplace and in many situations buyers’ ignorance has important consequences. How flammable is your children’s clothing? How will your automobile res­ pond to crashes of various kinds? Did you get cheated by the mechanic when you had the car repaired? What hidden defects are there in the house you are considering buying? What are your chances of being a victim of medical malpractice? What chemicals are leaching out of plastics into your food and drink and what are the consequences? Are cell phones really safe? And so on. You can be sure that the producers of these goods or services know much more about the answers than their customers. Even if the customers suspect there is a potential problem, they are unlikely to undertake the time-consuming and perhaps technically demanding research on their own.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

And I have not yet touched on what is perhaps the worst crisis in the field of medicine today, the one most demoralizing to the doctors: the malpractice crisis. This crisis illustrates dramatically, in yet another form, the lethal effects of government intervention in the field of medicine. Medical malpractice suits have trebled in the past decade. There are now [1985] about sixteen lawsuits for every hundred doctors. In addition, awards to plaintiffs average around $330,000 and are steadily climbing. The effect of this situation on physicians is unspeakable. First, I have been told, there is fear, chronic fear, the terror of the next attorney’s letter in the mail.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

These are indeed perilous times to practice medicine. There has been much debate about whether it is becoming too expensive for doctors to practice because of the increasingly onerous rates for malpractice insurance. That debate centers on the question of who should bear the risk of medical mistakes and how high medical malpractice insurance premiums can rise before doctors begin to abandon certain areas of specialization. What is given much less attention, however, is another risk attendant to medical practice, namely federal indictment. That risk is particularly acute for certain medical practitioners, such as those who treat chronic pain.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Just as a siege of saving, or hoarding of gold, impelled by a fear of economic trouble, may cause depression by greatly reducing consumer demand, so a siege of insurance can bring about some of the dangers that motivate it. Even private insurance firms, under the pressure of government to extend their services, can suffer from a number of serious moral hazards. Arson for some years was among America’s most popular crimes; most of it was induced by fire insurance. Medical malpractice suits have burdened the entire industry and snarled the services of doctors in red tape, largely because juries rush to award huge settlements on the assumption that insurance will pay. Health insurance has so dramatically raised medical costs—by removing any concern with price from the calculations of doctors and patients—that the residual down payments (the deductibles) often exceed the total payments of the past.


pages: 443 words: 153,085

The Intern Blues: The Timeless Classic About the Making of a Doctor by Robert Marion

Albert Einstein, medical malpractice, medical residency, Mount Scopus, place-making

Like the interns who came before them and like the interns who will follow them, they’re at present trapped in the depths of the February depression. But I’ve told them to take heart. The light for them is beginning to appear at the end of the tunnel. A lot has happened to the public’s conception of internship over the past year. Various cases of suspected medical malpractice caused in at least some small part by the fact that unsupervised, overtired, and overwhelmed interns had allegedly made errors in judgment at critical junctures in the management of patients have received a great deal of publicity. The effect of this media attention has been that the lay public’s eyes finally have been forced open to the fact that young doctors are often required to work over a hundred hours a week in a system that’s antiquated, unnatural, and unhealthy for both the patients and the physicians themselves.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In health outcomes the United States ranks below all other major democracies, by measures such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality. That’s because the U.S. has high health-related expenditures for purposes not leading to healthy outcomes, such as high insurance premiums charged by our for-profit health insurance companies, high administrative costs, high costs of prescription drugs, high costs of medical malpractice insurance and defensive medicine, and expensive emergency room care for our large uninsured population that cannot afford non-emergency care. We began these two chapters about the U.S. with an account of my country’s strengths. We then discussed what I see as our most serious problems now unfolding.


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Josh Koskoff, an affable and energetic litigator who was lead lawyer in the Remington case, ran KKB, a third-generation Connecticut firm. While over their history the Koskoffs had taken on big civil rights cases, for years the bulk of their caseload was made up of serious personal injury, wrongful death, and medical malpractice suits. The firm’s late founder, Theodore Koskoff, defended clients ranging from Black Panther members to disgraced trial lawyer F. Lee Bailey. The late Michael Koskoff, Theodore’s son and Josh’s father, had teamed up with Josh’s brother Jacob to write the screenplay for Marshall, a film about an early case in the career of U.S.


pages: 2,045 words: 566,714

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax by J K Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

The IRS allowed an exception for doctors working in a clinic. The doctors were not taxed on fees for treating patients with limited income (teaching cases) where they were required to assign the fees to a foundation. - - - - - - - - - - Court Decision Tax on Assigned Contingent Fee An attorney who took a medical malpractice case on a contingent fee basis agreed to split the net fee with his ex-wife pursuant to their divorce agreement. After a favorable settlement, the attorney’s take was approximately $40,000 after expenses, half of which went to his ex-wife. Each paid tax on his or her share. The attorney argued that his partial assignment of the fee could shift the tax liability because collection was contingent on the outcome of the lawsuit.

The attorney supervised three clerical employees in providing legal support services to the tenant firms, which included client intake, answering phones and taking messages, conducting legal research, typing briefs and memoranda, binding briefs, photocopying, taking dictation, express mailing, process serving, filing documents at the courthouse and state capital, maintaining a file room, law library, and conference facilities, and providing coffee service. Her husband provided consulting services to the attorneys, reviewing medical malpractice cases, serving as an expert medical witness, helping the attorneys prepare for accreditation reviews of health-care organizations, and providing quality assurance trainings. Before the Tax Court, the tenant firms testified that these support services, particularly the legal research, were unique and that they would not have moved into the LLC’s building without them.


pages: 1,845 words: 567,850

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014 by J. K. Lasser

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

The IRS allowed an exception for doctors working in a clinic. The doctors were not taxed on fees for treating patients with limited income (teaching cases) where they were required to assign the fees to a foundation. - - - - - - - - - - Court Decision Tax on Assigned Contingent Fee An attorney who took a medical malpractice case on a contingent fee basis agreed to split the net fee with his ex-wife pursuant to their divorce agreement. After a favorable settlement, the attorney’s take was approximately $40,000 after expenses, half of which went to his ex-wife. Each paid tax on his or her share. The attorney argued that his partial assignment of the fee could shift the tax liability because collection was contingent on the outcome of the lawsuit.

The attorney supervised three clerical employees in providing legal support services to the tenant firms, which included client intake, answering phones and taking messages, conducting legal research, typing briefs and memoranda, binding briefs, photocopying, taking dictation, express mailing, process serving, filing documents at the courthouse and state capital, maintaining a file room, law library, and conference facilities, and providing coffee service. Her husband provided consulting services to the attorneys, reviewing medical malpractice cases, serving as an expert medical witness, helping the attorneys prepare for accreditation reviews of health-care organizations, and providing quality assurance trainings. Before the Tax Court, the tenant firms testified that these support services, particularly the legal research, were unique and that they would not have moved into the LLC’s building without them.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

At twenty-four, he set up an independent legal practice devoted to “contingency-fee” cases, in which he generally sued corporations on behalf of individuals and got paid only if he won damages or settled for cash. “I don’t think you could hire me for an hourly rate, no matter what,” he explained later. “If I win, I have to have some skin in the game, a piece of the action.” He won his first million-dollar medical malpractice verdict in the 1980s and kept going. United Cable settled a racial discrimination case with him in 1990 for $106 million. The accounting firm Ernst & Young settled over a business bankruptcy matter for $185 million. He won a jury verdict against a bank for $276 million. A contingency attorney such as Snyder generally took about a third of such verdicts as his fee.10 By the time of the Jacksonville Exxon gasoline leak, Stephen Snyder had reached his late fifties.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2016: For Preparing Your 2015 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

The IRS allowed an exception for doctors working in a clinic. The doctors were not taxed on fees for treating patients with limited income (teaching cases) where they were required to assign the fees to a foundation. Court Decision Tax on Assigned Contingent Fee An attorney who took a medical malpractice case on a contingent fee basis agreed to split the net fee with his ex-wife pursuant to their divorce agreement. After a favorable settlement, the attorney’s take was approximately $40,000 after expenses, half of which went to his ex-wife. Each paid tax on his or her share. The attorney argued that his partial assignment of the fee could shift the tax liability because collection was contingent on the outcome of the lawsuit.

The attorney supervised three clerical employees in providing legal support services to the tenant firms, which included client intake, answering phones and taking messages, conducting legal research, typing briefs and memoranda, binding briefs, photocopying, taking dictation, express mailing, process serving, filing documents at the courthouse and state capital, maintaining a file room, law library, and conference facilities, and providing coffee service. Her husband provided consulting services to the attorneys, reviewing medical malpractice cases, serving as an expert medical witness, helping the attorneys prepare for accreditation reviews of health-care organizations, and providing quality assurance trainings. Before the Tax Court, the tenant firms testified that these support services, particularly the legal research, were unique and that they would not have moved into the LLC’s building without them.


pages: 1,061 words: 341,217

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal by William D. Cohan

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, David Brooks, fixed income, medical malpractice, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, union organizing

In the warrant for her arrest, Durham police wrote that there was “probable cause” to believe that Mangum “unlawfully, willfully and feloniously did assault” Daye with a “KITCHEN KNIFE, a deadly weapon, with the intent to kill and [inflict] serious injury.” In a 911 call from Daye’s nephew to police, after Daye had been stabbed, the nephew said to the dispatcher, “It’s Crystal Mangum. THE Crystal Mangum! I told him she was trouble from the damn beginning.” Daye died eleven days later at Duke Hospital. “His death was a result of medical malpractice at Duke Hospital,” Mangum told me from jail. “Everything was fine. He was getting ready to be discharged. All of a sudden they put that endotracheal tube—instead of putting it in his trachea, they put it in his esophagus. So it went into his stomach, so they filled the stomach up with air while his lungs were deflating.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

Where only part of the contribution is subject to forfeiture, the amount of withheld contribution not subject to forfeiture is taxable income. You should check with your employer to determine the status of your contributions. Court Decision Tax on Assigned Contingent Fee An attorney who took a medical malpractice case on a contingent fee basis agreed to split the net fee with his ex-wife pursuant to their divorce agreement. After a favorable settlement, the attorney's take was approximately $40,000 after expenses, half of which went to his ex-wife. Each paid tax on his or her share. The attorney argued that his partial assignment of the fee could shift the tax liability because collection was contingent on the outcome of the lawsuit.

The attorney supervised three clerical employees in providing legal support services to the tenant firms, which included client intake, answering phones and taking messages, conducting legal research, typing briefs and memoranda, binding briefs, photocopying, taking dictation, express mailing, process serving, filing documents at the courthouse and state capital, maintaining a file room, law library, and conference facilities, and providing coffee service. Her husband provided consulting services to the attorneys, reviewing medical malpractice cases, serving as an expert medical witness, helping the attorneys prepare for accreditation reviews of health-care organizations, and providing quality assurance trainings. Before the Tax Court, the tenant firms testified that these support services, particularly the legal research, were unique and that they would not have moved into the LLC's building without them.


pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Constitution’s separation of church and state as a financial shield, saying it prevented any court from interfering with its church-granted powers.84 “Neither the bishop nor the diocese is the owner of parish property under Canon Law,” Nicholas Cafardi, the dean of Duquesne Law School and himself a canon law scholar, said in a sworn statement.85 Notwithstanding all its careful planning to keep a legal moat around the Vatican, in 2003 the church was caught by surprise when a Louisville, Kentucky, gun-slinging medical malpractice attorney, William McMurray, filed a federal class action and named the Holy See. Three Louisville men claimed they were abused by priests for decades and sought damages on behalf of all American victims of clerical abuse. McMurray based his suit on a 1962 document uncovered in the discovery of another case, signed by Pope John XXIII, directing that sex abuse complaints against priests should be “pursued in a most secretive way.”86 Top church officials were furious about the Kentucky suit and moved to dismiss it on well-established grounds that the Pope was immune as a foreign sovereign from civil litigation in U.S. courts.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Waxman’s astute aide Ripley Forbes found that there was no great anti-preemption sentiment within the Coalition’s ranks, in all likelihood because its constituent organizations included a great many doctors who bore a professional antipathy to lawyers and lawsuits, in particular those claiming medical malpractice, and were not eager to bolster the rights of litigants in general. Myers told Gore that if dropping the preemption exclusion was what it would take to seal the deal, he would accept it—only to be told soon thereafter that the industry still had another dozen or so “problems”. By this point, Myers was ready to pull out of the negotiations and take his chances on a floor vote—assuming that Dingell ever freed the measure.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

In 2003, after I started working on this book, both General Re and Ajit Jain’s Berkshire Re were condemned in a special investigation for selling finite reinsurance that allegedly contributed to the collapse of an Australian insurer, HIH.9 Two years later, General Re was accused of fraud by insurance regulators and policyholders in connection with the failure of a Virginia medical malpractice insurer, the Reciprocal of America. While the Department of Justice investigated the allegations extensively, no charges were brought against Gen Re or any of its employees.10 That same year, Eliot Spitzer’s investigation of the insurance industry prompted an investigation by Berkshire’s law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, which discovered that six employees, including General Re’s former CEO, Ron Ferguson, and its former chief financial officer, Elizabeth Monrad, had allegedly conspired with a customer, AIG, to aid and abet an accounting fraud.