Articles

Back in February 1, 2025, we had an article on vaccinations titled, appropriately enough, “Vaccinations 2025”. It is now important to enlarge our knowledge about vaccinations because we live in an age where not everyone acknowledges the “settled science” that it...

This month’s article will deal with the economics of our hospital system, especially as related to charges made to uninsured patients. This has been partly reviewed in previous articles.  As a reminder, hospital care absorbs almost exactly 25% of the yearly medical...

In the March 15, 2025 article, A Brave New (Medical) World, we briefly touched upon ridiculous and unnecessary administrative burdens to the practice of medicine. These issues are important because costs are transferred to the patients. Today, we will focus on 1 of...

These days, one cannot help but to notice on television and print media the tremendous amount of pharmaceutical advertising done directly to the consumer. Although certainly not the most expensive part of healthcare spending (indeed, only a few percentage points),...

This month, in a change of pace, our article will announce the book noted above which this magazine, OMRUM, generated. Your editor is proud to announce the very recent publication this year and I think readers of this magazine and many, many others will find the book...

A very common injury type is traumatic injury, which is the application of external physical force to the human body. Some tissues have the ability to repair themselves after such an injury, e.g. bones and muscles. Other tissues have relatively limited ability to...

Our OMRUM article this month will be uniquely focused and detailed on the infrastructure necessary to meet the needs of the patient population, i.e. how to build a better mousetrap, in this case outpatient medical facilities including physician offices and related...

The above magnificent line of iambic hexameter from Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse” captures a great deal of the difficulty of modern medicine. This article will detail one relatively straightforward medical misstep (thalidomide) and another somewhat more complicated...

On May 15, 2024, this author wrote an article, Medication Costs, identifying the huge problem of excess costs for medications. Not surprisingly, 1.5 years later, this is no better and likely worse. That article reviewed the cost of atorvastatin in many pharmacies...

1 of the greatest discoveries in civilization was that of fire. Based on current evidence, our cousins Homo erectus may have used fire even before Homo sapiens some 1,000,000 years ago. Those in our genus (Homo) found fire for food preparation a survival advantage,...

Much of what OMRUM reviews and analyzes is the total amount of money spent on healthcare in the United States but also who claims what percentage of each dollar. Based on our historical trend, the United States will spend, for the 1st time ever, over $5 trillion on...

1 of the most important arms of the government for public health is the HHS (Health and Human Services). It was created in 1953 and was known originally as HEW (Health, Education, and Welfare). Its motto is “Improving the health, safety, and well-being of America”....

As many readers know, the U.S. Congress recently passed and forwarded a large legislative bill to the president which he signed on July 4, 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is close to 1000 pages long and a relatively complex item of legislation. It has many parts...

1 of the fallacies from which this magazine would like to disabuse readers is that the free market system as it applies to the healthcare system is working well in holding down costs in the United States of America. This lack of control is, of course, a common theme...

OMRUM has presented a number of articles demonstrating conflicting policies and priorities for patients in our current system. These policies lead to chaotic and profligate behaviors by larger entities such as hospitals. One unusual set of behaviors will be discussed...

Most would agree that the father of medical imaging is Wilhelm Röntgen who in 1895 made 2 interesting discoveries. The 1st were x-rays themselves and the 2nd was their ability to discern anatomic features such as bones. X-rays occupy the part of the electromagnetic...

This article will be something of a departure from many of the above articles. Previous articles emphasized the unusually inefficient system we have and the enormous cost savings our system could achieve by reform. However, this magazine is called OMRUM (Optimal...

Years ago, Charles de Gaulle of France famously said "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” In a similar fashion, one might ask how can we improve our current healthcare system when it is so heterogeneous, i.e. has so many different moving...

As noted often, the goal of OMRUM is to reduce the cost of healthcare while maintaining or (better yet) improving quality. However, any time one hears about reducing costs while improving quality, human experience urges caution if not overt doubt. After all, if...

In order to develop properly the idea of either outpatient or inpatient recidivism, some background is necessary. In this case, it involves who is responsible for the patient and who is responsible for patient care transitions. 1 of the most important concepts in a...