Shortly after I began medical practice in Ocean County New Jersey, the local  Medical Society, at a suggestion from a PR firm, asked that doctors write articles for the  The Daily Observer (eventually renamed the Ocean County Observer) in order to familiarize prospective patients with the local physicians.  This started a chain of weekly articles that I wrote which lasted from 1973 to 1993.

During that period the federal government was feeling its way around the issue of containing the costs of health care, and the articles railed against each of the bureaucratic regulations as they came down the pike, so in a way they detail the time-line of our present day plight.

Some of the articles are good, others are rants about conditions that in my judgment disrupted the profession. A number of them concern local hospital politics and would be of no interest to any but local people with long memories. Others range through topics far and wide. The eight articles about the first Gulf War written between 1991 and 1993 seem almost contemporary

For your convenience, for them to make sense as an entity, they are sorted by:            

As you can see, nothing has changed. The Health system was working through its organization towards present day chaos, other subjects have currency in today's world, and the articles about the Gulf War in 1990 could be substituted for the current arguments.

Enjoy, Charles Harris MD      Home