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Byline: Neil McLaughlin In the 1987 movie "The Untouchables,'' Sean Connery plays a veteran Chicago Irish cop known as Malone who winds up as reluctant mentor to Treasury agent Eliot [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing Editor Looking at the year that's closing and at recent headlines from the newspapers, I began to think there should be a Healthcare Study Group. If [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing editor It wasn't exactly the best of times and it wasn't exactly the worst, either. But 2006 had enough of both elements to make for a [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing Editor You may have seen the humorous guide to the world's religions that explains the different creeds through variations on the sentence "S-- happens.'' Having been [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing Editor Capt. Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca? Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. Renault: Waters? What waters? We're [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor You may have read in the news that a team of French physicians last week performed zero-gravity surgery. The doctors, seeking to develop robotic technology [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor The Cosa Nostra is an interesting moniker for organized crime. Meaning "our thing'' or "our affair,'' it sums up the organization's purpose and its attitude [...]

Byline: Neil Mclaughlin Managing Editor When scandals hit, there is a frenzy of concern and supposedly corrective action. But as the wrongdoing fades into the past, tepid reform measures are [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor Notes on the news: * There was a cartoon in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that showed two executives standing at a [...]

Byline: Neil Mclaughlin, Managing Editor Maybe you have had this experience recently picking up the morning newspaper. You know you live in the 21st century, but you have this overwhelming [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing editor Confidence and competence. Those two qualities exist too rarely in the same person. Just take a look at the corporate world and government and you [...]

Byline: Neil Mclaughlin, Managing Editor Hospital executives who felt out of the mainstream in the 1990s, when mergers and acquisitions occurred around them every 30 seconds, can feel good about [...]

Byline: Neil Mclaughlin, Managing Editor This issue is the last Modern Healthcare will publish in 2005. As usual, we offer readers a look back at the year in our Special [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, managing editor Whew! If you liked 2004, a busy and tumultuous year, you must have loved 2005. It began with providers responding to an international disaster and [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor At a time when the nation seems to be reliving the Scopes monkey trial, I can say definitively that the theory of evolution is bogus. [...]

Byline: Neil Mclaughlin, Managing Editor It's good to reflect on the past and how it brought us to the present. This is an exercise that's foreign to most Americans. We [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor As the last installment of the 'Star Wars'' series plays at a multiplex near you, it's a good time to remind chief financial officers that [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor Notes on the news: * I won't belabor the tragic case of Terri Schiavo, which has saturated the news for more than two weeks, but [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing editor These are times of polarization and bluster. Turn on your television and you'll be assaulted by the noise of politicians and pundits screaming at each [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor The reward for having low expectations is the occasional pleasant surprise. And when you think of low expectations, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor That was the year that was--and what a year it was. With a presidential election, mergers, lawsuits over hospitals' treatment of the uninsured, controversies over [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin We really shouldn't have any secrets,'' says Ralph Lawson, Baptist Health South Florida's chief financial officer, in last week's cover story on the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley (Dec. [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Hospital industry officials and lobbyists must have felt as if they were on vacation last week. After days of uncomfortable publicity regarding the Dartmouth Medical School reports [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin The heat is on. Just as the television networks are rolling out their latest cop programs, the quality police are staging some shows of their own. The [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Americans had a hard time getting a fill of substantive news last week. Politics created a media din as swift boat veterans threw dirt on John Kerry's [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin One sure lesson of history is that a lack of money leads to an inflammation of the body politic. When the nation is awash in easy money, [...]

The rejoinder dialogues with some of the perspectives offered on the discipline north of the border with an eye towards lessons that American sociologists might learn from the Canadian experience in response to the American sociologist special issue on Canadian Sociology is described. A critique is offered of the 'origin myth' of Canadian sociology as a particularly vibrant 'critical sociology', with discussion of Dorothy Smith's influence on sociology in Canada.

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor The news that HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson has ordered an investigation into the alleged suppression of cost estimates on the Medicare prescription drug bill offered [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Today's headlines regarding the corporate and public sectors are, to say the least, less than uplifting. The news is filled with tales of executives running empires of [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Assistant Managing Editor When Americans hear the word "pioneer,'' they think of the intrepid 18th and 19th century souls who journeyed into untamed territory in search of [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor Healthcare traditionally lags behind other industries in the use of technology and business innovations. But the field has done some quick remedial work in one [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor Lay in a supply of Pepcid. The chefs in Washington are cooking up a Medicare hash, and you can count on severe indigestion after they [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin, Managing Editor You couldn't blame those attending the recent American Hospital Association annual membership meeting in Washington for feeling a bit conflicted. Public officials speaking at the [...]

This article presents the story of the rise, fall and revival of Erich Fromm, arguably the most important psychosocial thinker of the 20th century. Fromm was a major intellectual figure in the 1940s, 1940s and 1950s in a period of time when psychosocial work was growing in influence. Work that continues in that tradition is outlined and the implications this story holds for the psychosocial school of thought is spelled out through given events in the world today (Trumpism and right wing nationalism in particular) that once again create space for psychosocial ideas. The opportunities and the challenges faced today by the psychosocial perspective are discussed in light of the lessons that can be learned by looking at the earlier case of the rise and fall of Erich Fromm and the current global revival of interest in his theories. I conclude by offering some thoughts on how elements of sectarianism have sometimes plagued the psychosocial perspective and how this can be avoided in the coming years as we look forward to the coming triumph of depth psychological perspectives in the social sciences.

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing Editor It's a sign of the times that the Harvard School of Public Health this month sponsored a leadership symposium in Boston on trust and healthcare. [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing Editor Notes on the news: * From the "It's About Time" file comes this development from Washington: HHS Inspector General Janet Rehnquist tells drugmakers to shape [...]

Byline: Neil McLaughlin Managing Editor Some hawkish Beltway pundits have been arguing lately that ``moral clarity'' should drive U.S. foreign policy. The world's evil movements and regimes must be eliminated [...]

Sometimes, you almost feel sorry for the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. On the one hand, the Joint Commission must deal with consumer advocates, who complain-with justification-that it [...]

The annual membership meeting of the American Hospital Association in Washington last week left some observers wondering anew whether the group's policy reach was too high and too broad. Certainly, [...]

Irony lives. Many pundits declared it dead after last fall's terrorist attacks as the mood of the country turned somber. But time went by, the numbness subsided, and we discovered [...]