Horgan Seminar Blog

        “The US Healthcare system is broken”- a phrase I have heard often that sparks a lot of debate, anger, even sadness within people, which is perfectly understandable. And the common reasons people give to back up the claim that our healthcare system is broken stems from high costs, worker shortage, the involvement of government in healthcare etc. However, I believe there are 2 sides to this coin. The US Healthcare System has improved the lives of many on various accounts including: Maternal and infant health, cancer reach and prevention, public awareness of diseases, vaccines, and the prevention and control of infectious diseases. Therefore, it is important to preface that US Healthcare isn’t something that should be taken for granted or a topic that should be discussed for the sole purpose of highlighting its current faults and shortcomings because when you look at the whole picture, it has done a lot of good.  When problems related to the current US He...

  Jack Caputo HST401 12 Feb 2026 Assignment 2 I pledge my Honor I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. x Jack Caputo WITH THE FORTUNE of living a long life comes the misfortunate of the complications of age. Most seniors eventually find challenging the tasks which were once trivial – showering, taking the stairs, doing laundry. This happens at different times for different people, and in different forms, but if you stay on this planet long enough, you will certainly start to pay for that long life of yours. I’ve been chewing on ideas of age and senior care for the past few months now. Allow me to set the scene: back in my hometown, my family lives across the street from a delightful older couple. Let’s call them Jim and Jane. They have had a great life together, travelling most of the world on excursions and cruises, and are generally just pleasant and polite in an old-timey sort of way. Genuine, pure souls. My family would see them only occasionally, maybe once a month. They w...

Faye Gilbert  John Horgan HST 401 February 11, 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System.                                       My grandma has always been a woman of routine. She’d wake up around four or six most mornings entirely on her own accord. She’d get dressed, make a cup of tea, and open her phonebook to dial a neighbor on the rotary. She’s stuck to this ritual for decades on end. However, in her older age, it falters at times. She’s started to forget some small steps, whether it be to turn off the bathroom faucet, or the kettle, or to pair some breakfast with her tea. She is not without help, though. On the increasingly often occasion time feels hazy to her and she stays in bed a little too long, she is provided a gentle nudge from the songbirds that inhabit her b...

Daniel Nagornyi Rehab is supposed to be hopeful, clean, redemptive, a second chance. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like one of those words that hides a mess underneath it as many facets of American healthcare do - like “innovation” or “efficiency” or “reform.” Words that sound good enough that we don’t ask too many questions. Thankfully for us though, many reporters have asked questions. Shoshana Walker in particular stumbled across a court-ordered rehab program operating in parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri . On paper, it looked progressive: instead of prison, judges were sending people with addiction to long-term treatment programs. This was supposed to be the humane alternative to incarceration, a sign that we’d finally started treating addiction as a disorder rather than a crime. But as Walter looked closer, she revealed that the program had been founded by a former poultry industry executive. Participants weren’t receiving therapy, or medical treatment, ...

            Nolan Hatchell-McNeil Professor Horgan HST 401 11 February 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. The American healthcare industry has a multitude of problems. But for many African Americans it is a minefield of neglect, discrimination, and exclusion. A history full of exploitation and dehumanization of black bodies has been America’s first industry and it seems no different that the medical industry would follow suit. In rare cases the exploitation of black bodies leads to scientific advancement, for example Henrietta Lacks and revolutionizing cancer treatment. However what about the millions of African Americans who are not Henrietta ? What happens to their stories ?      During times of slavery many of slaves were used as medical material.  Smith states “Dr. Preserved Porter, who preserved Mr. Fortune’s skeleton by boiling the bones to study anatomy at a time when cadavers were taken ov...

Connor Hsuan Professor Horgan HST 401 9 February 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. The Hidden Biases in the Research Industry While both of the readings from last week greatly surprised me and revealed aspects of the healthcare system I was not aware of, I was most surprised by the article “ How to survive the medical misinformation mess”. I was not aware of the level of misinformation that was present within physicians and professionals, which many people completely trust to be accurate. I wanted to investigate the first claim from the article, that published medical research is not reliable or is of uncertain reliability ( Ioannidis 2017) . What I found was that scientific findings are often misrepresented in articles and journals due to bias, misreporting of data, and detrimental research practices. When authors are reporting their findings in publications, many often misrepresent their findings due to their own preconceived biases, whether i...