The Big Business of Healthcare

Elizabeth Rosenthal, MD, is a former reporter and senior writer at The New York Times, Editor in Chief of Kaiser Health News, former ER physician, and author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. Dr. Rosenthal discussed the rapidly rising costs of healthcare in the past few decades and the reasons behind them. She gave examples of some of the more egregious differences in healthcare costs in the US, compared to other countries. She explained how healthcare consumers can learn to negotiate with hospitals and doctors.

Crossing the Street

For adults, crossing the street by foot seems easy. Yet it is anything but simple for a child.
Jodie Plumert, PhD, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa led a study that found that perceptual judgment and motor skills are not fully developed in most kids until age 14. She explained what parents can do to help children learn these life and death skills as early as possible.

Your Neighborhood and Your Health

Adriana Zuniga-Teran, architect, and postdoctoral research associate in the University of Arizona\'s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy conducted a study that examined how the design of a neighborhood can affect health and wellness. She found that those who live in traditional neighborhoods do the most walking, while those who live in suburban developments report the highest levels of mental well-being.

Elizabeth Rosenthal

isabeth Rosenthal, Editor-in-Chief, joined KHN in September 2016 after 22 years as a correspondent at the New York Times, where she covered a variety of beats from healthcare to environment to reporter in the Beijing bureau. While in China she covered SARs, bird flu and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in rural areas. Libby’s two-year-long New York Times series “Paying Till it Hurts” (2013-14) won many prizes for both health reporting and its creative use of digital tools. She is the author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back, published by Penguin Random House in April 2017. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School and briefly practiced medicine in a New York City emergency room before converting to journalism.

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Adriana Zuniga-Teran

Adriana Zuniga-Teranis a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona\'s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy working on transboundary water security in the arid Americas under the auspices of the International Water Security Network.



Adriana is collaborating on a participatory effort to measure the state of the health of the Cienega Watershed, in which a set of 19 cross-jurisdictional indicators were selected. Her role in this project is to meet with stakeholders and collect readably-available data, analyze it when necessary, and present it in a way that communicates well to the general public. This is a baseline effort that is intended to continue over time in order to do long-term monitoring and manage the watershed in an adaptive way.

Learn more about Ms. Zuniga-Teran