I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

In 2009, UnitedHealth, a leading insurance company, paid $350 million to settle lawsuits brought by the American Medical Association and other physician groups for shortchanging consumers and physicians for medical services outside its preferred network.

I definitely love 'Camelot.' It's my favorite show. I'm a big 'True Blood' fan. I love 'American Idol,' and I love my girl J-Lo. The rest are my homework shows: 'Forensic Files,' 'Dr. G. Medical Examiner,' 'The First 48.'

My mother-in-law, Nanny, spent her working years as a bookkeeper at a medical office in Columbus, Ohio. Like so many Americans, she worked hard and paid into Medicare, knowing that one day she could count on having high-quality health care when she needed it most.

Medicare is a monopoly: a central-planning bureaucracy grafted onto American health care. It exercises a stranglehold on the health care of all Americans over 65, and on the medical practices of almost all physicians. Medicare decides what is legitimate and what is not: which prices may be charged and which services may be rendered.

My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.

Concealing one's true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.

I did live through Katrina and also Hurricane Rita, which hit Lake Charles. Interestingly, when Katrina hit, they evacuated and Lake Charles was one of the evacuation destinations. We opened up the civic center of the city to the evacuees and provided them free medical and psychiatric care there.

If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.

Harvard Medical School, the University of South Florida and the American Psychiatric Association have all conducted studies showing that the earlier one begins gambling, the more likely it is he or she will become an addicted, problem gambler.

If one of us, any of us, any American is traveling in a town somewhere in America and a medical crisis hits them, for someone who is diabetic or perhaps has heart disease or some other problems, where do we get the records to determine what to do?

Ensuring Americans have access to adequate medical care should be a priority for all of us.

I do not believe that Congress or the Administration should prohibit the medical community from pursuing a promising avenue of research that may improve the lives of millions of Americans.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

Reform of the medical liability system should be considered as part of a comprehensive response to surging medical malpractice premiums that endanger Americans' access to quality medical care.

Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous.

We have the greatest hospitals, doctors, and medical technology in the world - we need to make them accessible to every American.

There is a shortage of doctors, and the American Medical Association is aiming to keep it that way.

Even putting aside the Judeo-Christian morality upon which the Constitution and our nation's culture are based, the notion of forced euthanasia would contradict the long-held body of medical ethics to which all American doctors must adhere.

As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me.

I don't know what it's like to be Cuban-American, but I know what it's like to have family under Communism and to get up early in the morning and send medical supplies and try to send food and try to send money and have it intervened, and them calling and crying on the phone.

When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.

A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established.