Len Zwelling

Are Layoffs A Sign Of Good Or Bad Management? By Leonard Zwelling http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/MD-Anderson-set-to-announce-layoffs-today-10837056.php http://abc13.com/news/watch-live-md-anderson-announces-layoffs/1687649/ http://inside3.mdanderson.org/streams/FullVideoPlayer.cfm?mediaID=9AB90015-DA18-407E-B23B-3DBACA6A360D http://www.click2houston.com/news/md-anderson-to-address-layoff-announcement-thursday http://abc13.com/business/md-anderson-cancer-center-to-cut-800-900-jobs/1687649/ Isn’t that the essential question? When any organization stops turning a profit, even a non-profit, that’s a sure sign that those in charge of that organization are either spending too much, not bringing in enough, or both. At […]

Health Care Reform And MD Anderson: Can The ACA Explain Some Of The Financial Problem? By Leonard Zwelling Abby Goodnough and Robert Pear authored this long feature in the NY Times on January 3 that describes the lasting effects of the Affordable Care Act. These are the effects that even the GOP pledge to repeal

The Lesson Of Putin’s Inaction: Memo To The MD Anderson Faculty By Leonard Zwelling Finally, after multiple examples of Russian cyberwar incursions into America’s infrastructure and political processes, President Obama acted on December 29. He threw out some Russian officials, most of whom were probably spies, and closed down two facilities that harbored Russian agents.

Settlements: My Take By Leonard Zwelling Much has been made of the United States’ position to allow the UN Security Council vote against the Israeli settlements in the West Bank to stand. Usually the Americans would have vetoed such a resolution, but the US abstained allowing its passage. Now Secretary of State John Kerry has

A New Web Site: MD Anderson Blogs, Healthcare Reform And Politics: My Takes By Leonard Zwelling Although I will continue to post blogs on lenzwelling.blogspot.com, you will soon be directed to the new web site, www.lenzwelling.com. This will have the blogs as well as pictures, my references and cv, and soon ways to buy the

The Real MD Anderson: It’s Not About The Money By Leonard Zwelling I arrived in Houston a reluctant recruit, following my wife to her dream job at MD Anderson. I soon learned I had also landed a dream job of my own. I was recruited to do translational research, biochemistry with clinical relevance. My Division

Meddling In Governance By Leonard Zwelling In a chilling op-ed piece in the NY Times on Saturday, December 17, Ariel Dorfman, a famous playwright and emeritus professor at Duke, describes how the United States in general and the CIA, in particular, interfered in the elections and governance of countries all over the world, from his

EMR=BAD By Leonard Zwelling          A close friend recently forwarded me an article and editorial from the Annals of Internal Medicine (165:753 and 818, 2016). The article describes the results of a series of time-motion studies examining the actual time doctors spend with patients vs. the time they spend with the electronic medical record (EMR)

The Manchurian Presidents By Leonard Zwelling          One of the great political thriller films of all time is 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate. It was directed by John Frankenheimer from a book by Richard Condon published three years before. The black-and-white film (not the awful remake with Denzel Washington of a few years back) stars Frank

Hospital expenses Regarding “MD Anderson battles $111m deficit” (Page A1, Thursday), that a nonprofit like MD Anderson should have both an $111 million deficit and a $2.8 billion cash reserve is mysterious enough given the institution’s tax-exempt status as an agency of the state of Texas. The article and the MD Anderson spokesman suggest that