Healthy Communities Online

This week on Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Steven Woolf, Distinguished Chair in Population Health at Virginia Commonwealth University – and Health Equity Director Emeritus and Senior Advisor at the V-C-U Center on Society and Health. He talks about their just-released report – showing a decline in life expectancy among working-aged adults in the US – a result of the lingering effects of the recession, the opioid crisis and other so-called deaths…

Read More Read More

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with US Senator Bill Cassidy (R) LA, on the bipartisan bill he co-sponsored aimed at protecting personal health information from industry profiteering. He discusses the “Smartwatch Data Act” which seeks to protect data generated on smart watches, personal electronic devices and genomics testing, to give patients more control over how their data is used for commercial gain.

This week, on the eve of World Aids Day, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter revisit their conversation with Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the quest to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in ten years. They discuss the CDC’s efforts to advance infection prevention in high risk groups through the use of PrEP, better treatment protocols for those already infected, and the ongoing quest to develop an AIDS vaccine.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Louis Philipson, President of Medicine and Science at the American Diabetes Association and Director of the Kovler Diabetes Center at the University of Chicago who addresses the enormous public health threat of 30 million Americans diagnosed with diabetes as well as 70 million more with pre-diabetes. He examines the challenge of helping patients manage their conditions and talks about promising new research on genomics-based precision medicine approaches to treating…

Read More Read More

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Andy Slavitt, former Acting Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama, and founder of United States of Care, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to expanding health coverage to all Americans. He examines how efforts to derail health coverage for Americans has become political ‘kryptonite’ and how there must be bipartisan solutions to expanding coverage, reducing drug costs and addressing health disparities in this country.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Dr. Ken Duckworth, Medical Director for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the nation’s largest grassroots organization addressing mental health issues. They discuss causes behind the growing problem of anxiety, depression, suicide and the opioid use disorder, and viable solutions to address the gap in access to mental health care through better screening, telehealth and better training of primary care clinicians.