Clinical Conversations

July 10th, 2016

Podcast 204: Medical marijuana’s effect on Medicare prescriptions

[Note: a transcript of this interview will be added in a few days’ time.] Our guest has strong indirect evidence that medical marijuana has been replacing “standard” drugs in states where it is legal. In doing so, the substitution is saving the Medicare system modest amounts of money. Their evidence, published in Health Affairs, comes from an […]

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March 10th, 2016

Podcast 198: Three laws that could reduce U.S. firearm mortality

Implementing universal background checks for gun purchases, for ammunition purchases, and mandating firearm identification could dramatically lower U.S. mortality attributable to firearms, our guest says. In the Lancet, Dr. Bindu Kalesan and her colleagues examined state gun laws associated with the lowest mortality rates and concluded that if three of those laws were implemented at the […]

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September 27th, 2015

Podcast 185: A Spirited Discussion on Medicare’s ‘Doc Fix’ Fix for Reimbursement

A group of physicians, economists, and medical students gathered on Medstro to talk about Medicare’s solution to the decades-old “doc fix” problem — it’s how you get paid for caring for Medicare patients. The chat was occasioned by an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine by Meredith Rosenthal, an economist and a close observer […]

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