Happy Birthday, Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is one of the most impressive people I have interviewed. Gawande is a practicing surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a MacArthur  Fellow. In this wide-ranging discussion about Gawande’s book “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” he explains how medical science views death as a failure and does not always examine how medical treatments affect people at the end; the astronomical cost of end of life care; innovations in assisted living and hospice to not only improve the quality of life but also allow people to live longer; and how health care professionals are trying to become better at end of life care.