Care & Cost Merges Into The Doctor Weighs In

Brian Klepper

When I began Care & Cost in December of 2010, the idea was to aggregate consistently good health care writing, and to moderate the comments to ensure a courteously professional exchange on the site.

It has been a pleasure and even an honor to scour health care blogs of all types early each weekday morning. Wonderfully dedicated and thoughtful colleagues – Merrill Goozner, Kenny Lin, David Harlow, Wendy Lynch, Brad Flansbaum, Bill Bestermann, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Paul Levy, Jaan Sidorov, Tom Emerick, Bob Laszewski, Roger Collier, and many more – graciously allowed me to republish their work. The result, I think, has been a cornucopia of high quality insight and knowledge.

Being dedicated to the exercise let me build a faithful readership that included professionals of all political and philosophical persuasions, who vigorously disagreed at times, but always with respect.

Even so, my own schedule has intensified, and maintaining C&C has become more difficult day-to-day. I’m very involved in the development of WeCare TLC, a leading edge onsite clinic and medical management firm. I’ve helped to spearhead the campaign against the current structure of the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update (RUC) and that organization’s corrosive relationship with CMS. I’m continuing to write, now as a Medscape columnist on Business of Medicine and Primary Care, as well as for other venues. And I’m devoted to the struggle to deal with my wonderful wife Elaine’s peritoneal (ovarian) cancer.

I’ve chosen to fold into The Doctor Weighs In (TDWI) for several reasons. Perhaps most important, it reflects approximately the same sensibility – and possibly a more expansive one – on the kinds of content that a good professional health care magazine should be running. TDWI’s founders and editors are my very close friends Pat Salber, MD MBA and Dov Michaeli, MD PhD, both writers and thinkers whose work I hugely admire. Over the past several months, we’ve often posted the same columns.

So I urge you to head over there and sign up for their morning email. I am deeply grateful and humbled that you chose to spend time with me trying to better understand the many complexities that have made American health care so interesting and vexing.

Thank you for coming. Let’s continue this conversation over at TDWI.