Pelzman’s Picks: Doubts on Hospitals’ Price Lists

• Hospitals’ price lists, now required to be posted online, may be more confusing than helpful for patients, Julie Appleby and Barbara Feder Ostrov write ~ As Hospitals Post Sticker Prices Online, Most Patients Will Remain Befuddled (Kaiser Health News)
• Victor R. Fuchs, PhD, explores what a single-payer healthcare system in the U.S. might look like ~ Is Single Payer the Answer for the US Health Care System? (JAMA)
• Stacie B. Dusetzina, PhD, and Michelle M. Mello, JD, PhD, explain the public health and legal concerns of requiring TV drug ads to disclose a product’s list price ~ Disclosing Prescription-Drug Prices in Advertisements — Legal and Public Health Issues (New England Journal of Medicine)
• “But as we would come to find out, the odds were not on our side,” writes Emily M. Bucholz, MD, PhD, MPH, reflecting on the death of her daughter ~ Against the Odds (JAMA)
• Howard Bauchner, MD, Phil B. Fontanarosa, MD, MBA, and Annette Flanagin, RN, MA, discuss the challenges of ensuring authors’ provide complete and honest conflicts of interest disclosures in journal articles ~ Conflicts of Interests, Authors, and Journals (JAMA)
• “I had never been as scared as I was on that first day of my internship,” Richard B. Weinberg, MD, writes. Fortunately, he discovered he was not alone ~ The Hands of an Angel (Annals of Internal Medicine)
• Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP, Daniel Wolfson, MPP, and Lawrence P. Casalino, MD, PhD, describe misconceptions that have contributed to the failure of performance improvement programs for physicians ~ Professionalism, Performance, and the Future of Physician Incentives (JAMA)

Fred N. Pelzman, MD, of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and weekly blogger for MedPage Today, follows what’s going on in the world of primary care medicine. Pelzman’s Picks is a compilation of links to blogs, articles, tweets, journal studies, opinion pieces, and news briefs related to primary care that caught his eye.