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Hello everyone! As usual I must begin with an apology for allowing so much time to pass since my last post, especially when so much is happening involving healthcare. My only excuse is that I have been busy giving a lot of thought to Charlatans the Movie. I have included a pic of how much Primo is impressed with my work by parking his butt on it (laugh out loud). As I said in a previous post, the hardest part about writing a screenplay from a novel is deciding what to discard and what to keep because if a movie was made of Charlatans like the book it would probably be about 6 hours long, which is 4 hours to much. But I think tonight I finally figured it all out. We’ll see. Of course, I have also been working on my next book, which, by the way, is not going to be called CHIMERA but rather PANDEMIC. I hope this change doesn’t bother those of you who thought CHIMERA was an okay title. But the story is going to be about the beginnings of a PANDEMIC so it is a very appropriate title, and the word is a bit more recognizable to most people. The word ‘chimera� is not part of everyone’s everyday lexicon lol, whereas ‘pandemic� is. Of course, in the story the pandemic is going to be caused by a chimera, so chimera is not unreasonable as a title just a bit esoteric. I welcome any comments about this titling issue, but my publishers were adamant on both sides of the Atlantic when I presented the two ideas. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, Laurie and Jack will be back in PANDEMIC with some significant changes in their lives since their last appearance in the book CURE. There will be another child in their household, and Laurie will have moved to the front office of the OCME (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for NYC) to take over Bingham’s job. Accordingly, among her other responsibilities, she will have the unenviable task of trying to keep Jack from flouting the rules as he investigates cases. Part of my research has been to reread CURE, INTERVENTION, and CRITICAL because they are books staring my favorite couple. Now this may sound self-promoting, but I had a lot more fun reading them than I expected. I also enjoyed remembering the research that I did for all three books. For those people who don’t know, I do a lot of research for each book, and I do it all myself. I don’t hire research assistants because doing the research is the most fun part of writing a book. Maybe even the only fun part lol because writing is hard work. With both CURE and INTERVENTION I took some fascinating trips. For CURE I went to Japan with particular interest in Kyoto, which is where the book starts. For INTERVENTION it was back to Rome to revisit the archeological dig beneath Saint Peters and to Israel where the book ends. I didn’t need to travel for CRITICAL as it all takes place in NYC, but I remember I had to do a lot of research on business. After finishing the book I was impressed with how much CRITICAL says about how business interests have undermined medicine’s role in our society. Now before I sign off I must say a few words about our President’s misguided directive to allow health insurance companies to sell watered-down health insurance plans. For those of you who have read my healthcare posts in the past will immediately understand why this is a bad idea. Yes, these watered-down plans will have lower premiums, but if the person who buys them gets sick, these watered-down plans will provide very limited coverage. The problem is that our health insurance companies are ‘for profit� enterprises, meaning that their role is to make money for their investors. Providing healthcare is not part of their concern so their behavior must be regulated to some degree. In every industrialized country that uses private health insurance companies the industry is regulated to some appropriate degree. One of the benefits of the ACA or Obamacare is that poor policies were not allowed and profits were limited. In Trump’s own words, his newest healthcare directive is ‘fake� progress.





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