About
Naomi Freundlich is an award-winning journalist, policy wonk and health advocate with over 25 years experience writing and thinking about health care, medicine, and the absolute necessity of creating an equitable, affordable and high-quality health care system that offers coverage to all who need it.
In her last gig as Senior Research Associate at The Century Foundation, Naomi was a regular contributor to and editor of HealthBeat, a blog that focused on health policy and was a influential voice for reform in the battle to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Her posts on cancer screening, Medicaid policy, long-term care, mental health and the pharmaceutical industry (just to mention a few) were featured on The Healthcare Blog, Kevin MD, Alternet, and Time Magazine’s Moneyland–among other sites.
Before she started blogging, Naomi was Medical Editor at Business Week where she shared in winning the National Magazine Award for a cover story on cloning and the new frontiers of biotechnology. She was also a freelance writer whose work included articles on such varied topics as biomedical research, personal genome testing, the drug industry, women’s health, parenting and sports medicine. Over the years Naomi’s work appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Real Simple, More, Parents and Business Week.
In her free time, Naomi is an avid soccer player and fan; and spends an inordinate amount of time watching her children compete in athletic events. She aspires to travel to Brazil in 2014 for the World Cup.
Health Train Express offers physician opinion in regard to health reform,and digital advances. Our blog has been published since 2005. Health Reform will require the re-integration of health diagnosis, treatment, reimbursement, and business paradigms as well as accomodating increased demand by the entrance of baby boomers and the increase in the number of insured due to Patient Affordability and Patient Care Act. Combined with reductions in reimbursement, and increasing overhead and disruptive innovations such as electronic medical records health information exchanges will play a complex role in conversion of the business of medicine. Adding to this challenge is the already significant shortage of primary care physicians and the disparity between primary care physicians reimbursement and specialty care reimbursement.The time-table for accomplishing these changes is short and increases the risk of increasing cost and failure. It will be difficult to assign real cost effective results as due to one segment of the proposed changes in the Patient Affordability and Patient Care Act. The “Butterfly Effect” (coined by Edward Lorenz,using chaos theory) can produce unintended consequences with cost shifting and unforseen adjustment(s) by various segments in the health care equation.