Jay Parkinson, MD

The big news in the doctor world during the past few weeks has been the new guidelines for statin medications. The pharmaceutical companies have expanded the definition of disease to label more people as diseased.

Physicians aren't so much team players. Giving up decision-making control to someone else isn't in their DNA. But being an entrepreneur requires being a team player, giving up control, and managing people. It's a skill we have to learn.

Primary care is in such a bad state. Only about 5% of graduating residents are choosing primary care mostly because primary care doctors can expect to earn $3.5 million less than a specialist over their lifetimes.

One of the hallmarks of Obama's healthcare reform was ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions would not be denied health insurance. The clause went into effect in September 2010.

Upon finishing my second residency at Hopkins in Baltimore in September of 2007, I moved back to Williamsburg to start a new kind of practice.

The Partnership for Prescription Assistance (PPA) was founded in 2005 as a joint effort by America’s pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies to help patients find medical programs for which they may eligible to obtain free or nearly-free medication and services.

Imagine if a judge allowed companies to patent oxygen, we’d all be paying that company to breathe. That’s the equivalent of what’s going on in the genetics world. The cost of “discovering” a gene in the past few decades has been quite expensive. And the potential profit that stems from testing and manipulating that gene in humans could be quite lucrative.

Eliot Spitzer, when he was New York’s Attorney General, set up a website to expose the prices of the most popular medications sold in New York pharmacies. The pharmacies "complied."

Health insurance premiums double every 8 years because healthcare costs double every eight years. We also spend almost double on healthcare per person compared to other countries. So what does this mean now that we’ve mandated sickcare insurance?

Ten percent of people spend 80% of healthcare dollars. Therefore 90% of people spend only 20%. The vast majority of us are light healthcare users. We may need a couple of office visits a year and maybe we cut our finger and need some stitches. Ninety percent of us don’t require much.