"...This smoothly produced hour-long report will raise your hackles and spike your blood pressure.

This is the story of the insidious effect of bottom-line financial pressures on the medical profession. In it, able physicians are constantly being forced into roles as bean counters, consciously or unconsciously calculating profit and loss every time they prescribe a pill or arrange a hospitalization.

What makes the PBS production so effective is the way it intimately personalizes critical but complex issues of medical economics. ...

This program is specifically about Boston, with its expensive teaching hospitals and their reliance on dwindling federal funding. The only notable problem with the crisply intelligent and surprisingly gripping report is its failure to explain how, or even whether, Boston's troubled system represents American medical care at large."

"...No wonder acclaimed series 'Frontline' has set its savvy sights on managed medical care--with the trenchant investigative report 'Dr. Solomon's Dilemma' premiering Tuesday.

If you want to take serious charge of your health, this deft documentary should not be missed. Because the reality it shows is daunting.

A cost-cutting corporation may well have swallowed up your trusted physician's practice. And that means your care could be in crisis.

...Meanwhile the larger question is, where will the medical buck stop? This particular 'Frontline' does not attempt an answer. But it does prove how crucial an answer is."

"We've heard some of this before--patients discharged, as a matter of course, three days after quadruple-bypass operations; doctors punished for ordering 'too many' tests. But this 'Frontline' documentary examines the latest painful and frightening twist. As correspondent Hedrick Smith notes early in the film, doctors at the teaching hospitals around Harvard Medical School are taking power back from the HMOs. ... But there's a catch--taking control means assuming financial risk--the more care they give, the more it costs them directly.... This conflict of interest now pits doctor vs. doctor--and patients are caught in the middle."

"...'Dr. Solomon's Dilemma' is an informative biopsy of the great health-care malignancy. It doesn't pretend to look at the big picture, doesn't offer any grand solutions and doesn't explain how the economics of the health and medicine 'marketplace' are skewed by government meddling and the third-party payment system

But the hour show is informative, well done and not out to trash doctors, hospitals or even insurance companies. It is further proof that any subject--even the brain-stopping intricacies of managed health care--can be humanized and made interesting by the clever producers of 'Frontline.'"

"...does a good job showing both the human and economic side of a very complicated subject. The problems it lays out are clear: decline in patient care and an inevitable erosion in the doctor/patient relationship.

What we don't get are any solutions, or even suggestions beyond continued cost cutting. ..."