David Hilfiker
The Debt Crisis
The more threatening dangers in the political handling of recent "debt crisis" are not over with the legislation to raise the debt ceiling. Even beyond the legislation's disastrous consequences of for the poor, the process used to arrive at the decision poses a direct threat to democracy. The direct power of the financial industry over government has also become explicit.
The so-called debt crisis is over. It had little to do, however, with the national debt and the real crisis is far from over.
Government
The debt crisis was completely manufactured. Everyone knew from the very beginning that the ceiling on the national debt limit would have to be raised because the country must take on more debt in order to pay its past debts
Facing Our Mistakes
This 1984 article in the New England Journal of Medicine is the writing for which I am most notorious in the medical profession. It's about the inevitability of making serious mistakes as a physician, the agony it brings to the physician, and our usual inability to deal with it. Although the article received wide coverage in the medical literature, it would be over ten years before other doctors began writing about their mistakes publicly. The article became one of the chapters in my first book, Healing the Wounds.
On a warm July morning I finish my rounds at the hospital around nine o’clock and walk across the parking lot to the clinic. After greeting Jackie, I look through the list of my day’s appointments and notice that Barb Daily will be in for her first prenatal examination. “Wonderful,” I think, recalling the joy of helping her deliver her first child two years ago. Barb and her husband, Russ, had been friends of mine before Heather was born, but we grew much closer with the shared experience of her birth. In a rural family practice such as mine, much of every weekday is taken up with disease; I look forward to the prenatal visit with Barb, to the continuing relationship with her over the next months, to the prospect of birth.
Welcome to my website!
I've posted here a number of my articles, speeches and sermons. Things are a little different for since my diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease, but that's going to become grist for this mill, too.
Clicking on an item from the primary menu (say Economics), brings up all the Economics essays, lectures, and sermons on one page. Clicking on a submenu (say Essays), brings up just the essays from the Economics section.
You may notice substantial duplication among lectures and between lectures and sermons. I've tried to keep these to a minimum, but in lectures and sermons subtantial new material is sometimes woven into old material. If you are perusing the entire site, I beg your tolerance.
All the material on the site is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that you're free to use anything here as long as you reference this site and don't make any money off the material. For details click here.
I also welcome the opportunity to teach or to speak to your group, especially about my cognitive impairment. For details, click here.
Link to My Blog Watching the Lights Go Out
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