Welcome to a new feature we're starting here on the Healthcare United website. Every Thursday, we're going to be taking a look at the medical blog community, affectionately known throughout the community as the "medblogs."

If you're not used to reading blogs, there's quite an active, robust group of nurses, doctors, pharmacists, and others - and if you'd like to check out our favorites, look to your right at our "blogroll"!

We'll be highlighting some of our favorite posts of the week right here, so you don't have to go on the hunt yourself. The goal of this new project is to introduce to you to what's out there and to highlight what's so great about the medblogger community. We're thinking that you'll love what you'll see!

And with that, here are four of our favorite posts from this week:

1) Musings of a Distractible Mind: "Is Wall Street Preventing Reform?": Rob over at Musings of a Distractible Mind has an excellent post about what happens when companies are "increasingly under pressure to produce in the short-term to keep their investors happy."

My favorite quote: "So what happens when these companies are inserted into a dysfunctional healthcare system? Insurers, pharmaceuticals, and device manufacturers are among the publicly-held companies through which a huge amount of cash is flowing. Is it any wonder why reform is slow to happen?"

It's one of the most comprehensive blog posts I've seen around this subject (besides the things on our blog, of course!), so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

2) The Kaiser Network: "The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism": Some of us over here at Healthcare United were able to attend a great event this week, sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, that took a close look at "the growing influence of blogs on health news and policy debates."

The keynote speaker was U.S. Hepartment of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt (who was the first cabinet officer to write an official blog) and the panel included Healthcare United favorite, Ezra Klein, who is a top-notch healthcare policy blogger/journalist. You should absolutely check out Ezra's blog if you haven't already.

You can watch the video by clicking here!

3) Madness: Tales of an Emergency Room Nurse: "Do Those With Insurance Get Better Care?": "Girlvet" over at Madness blogs about a recent article on Slate.com, written by two emergency room doctors, who state that hospitals "give preference to those with insurance." She thinks there's merit, but she's not entirely sold on the idea, for good reasons.

Girlvet says, "They find rooms for those who are transfers or direct admits before they do ER patients. The reason for that being that transfers and direct admits usually have insurance. People who come to the ER often have no insurance or are on medicaid or medicare. The hospital is paid less for the poor people on government aid for the same condition."

But she doesn't think it's that simple, and that there are plenty of more causes. "Lack of beds is about - short staffing, more acute patients, inefficient discharge systems and the like," she says. I'd certainly agree with her.

You can read the rest of the post by clicking here.

4) Digital Doorway: "The Nursing Shortage: A Global Crisis, Close to Home": Keith, RN over at Digital Doorway published a very thorough post on the nursing shortage, stating that "the nursing shortage is here to stay." 

Keith wonders how, in this election year, we might be able to address the issue. "In the coming months," he says, "it will be interesting to see how the two major political candidates address---or fail to address---the nursing shortage....And when it comes to national healthcare for the masses, if there are no nurses to deliver that care, then the plan is moot from the start. As far as this writer is concerned, any national healthcare policy debate that does not take into consideration the very real shortage of nurses in this country is a debate lacking an essential ingredient."

You can check out Keith's post here.

If you have any favorite posts yourself, or if you'd like to submit your own blog posts for "Medblogger Round-up" consideration, please e-mail them to me at brad@healthcareunited.org.

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