Arnold Relman, Health System Critic, Dead at 91

Arnold Relman, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, passed away last week at the age of 91. Relman was a longtime critic of the American health care system, calling it a “new medical-industrial complex” in a 1980 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine. In a 2009 interview with Science Friday, he said the system had “become a business, and as a business, it wants to constantly increase its sales, and until we change that, we’re not going to have real health care reform.” We remember him here with two archival clips.