Sublime

Mitch Katz directs the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the second-largest county health care system in the country. He described to me how economic incentives can stack up against upstream care. “Because there’s been little money toward prevention, there’s no payer or mechanism for prevention research like there is for medical

The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet.

Fighting a rising tide of paperwork and bureaucracy, providers of health care, whether physicians, nurses, or administrators, say that time has become a scarce resource of which they have far too little.

One would expect the last year of life to be the most expensive as people suffer with more severe, complex, and prolonged illness. But it does not have to be as expensive as it is in the United States. Hospice, which takes a holistic view of health, seeks to address medical and nonmedical symptoms for people whose life expectancy is deemed to be

Judaism’s “possibilism” about human nature, its conviction that we can choose the good even if we often don’t.

However, he continues, over the last 50 years the need for people to be “legible” and fit into a standard model of work has merely become “industrially preferable.” This puts government and institutional leaders in a position where they are incentivized to convince people that following rigid paths in their institutions is the correct path for

futurity:

Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in