Profound changes are occurring in medicine. These changes are in both medicine itself and also in the economic and social context. The driving forces for change include health care reform, sophisticated consumers, new technology, information explosion and ethics of controlling human biology.

Survey results show that the American public comes to the health care reform debate with ambivalent feelings and a relatively low base of specific knowledge. But Americans also hold a set of core values that will shape their response to various proposals for national change. These include (1) a moral commitment to the uninsured; (2) a desire to achieve personal peace of mind; (3) a lack of self...

I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent progree has been made to extend such methods to applications with a count dependent variable. An analysi...

n engl j med 363;20 nejm.org november 11, 201