I guess there’s just no way to have a sacred cow without also keeping a goat. Understand, I’m not talking about a GOAT, as in Tom Brady or Michael Jordan. I mean a goat, i.e, something or someone that takes the blame for an event, failed policy, etc., perhaps more commonly called a scapegoat. The sacred cow, in this instance, is the Second Amendment, which has become so sacrosanct in the national foundational myth of an inspired Constitution that it no longer means a great deal more than
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No Mask, No COVID-19 Pandemic, Right?
The end of the public transportation mask mandate, officially undone by federal Judge Kathryn Mizelle on April 18, may be recognized as the day the COVID-19 pandemic ended in America. Except it hasn’t ended in any real sense. The virus continues to produce new variants of greater or lesser transmissibility and lethality; for now, comparatively small numbers of people continue to die of the virus daily and weekly; and the CDC continues to recommend that the elderly and immunocompromised take
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What’s The Role of Digital Health in Public Health?
To a certain extent, the national conversation about the importance of a robust public health system has been happening for the last couple of years in the context of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, rather than discussing how the system can be strengthened and expanded, we’ve instead largely limited it to what the government can and cannot ask the public to do, as though the necessity of a public health system is still in doubt. For those who work in the arena, this is not an
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Ransomware in Healthcare: The Costly Reality of Withstanding Hackers
How much larger a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) can healthcare command? This isn’t a rhetorical question, even if it may be difficult to come up with a direct answer. After all, between 1960 and 2018, healthcare increased as a percentage of GDP from a modest 5 percent to more than triple that at almost 18 percent. Over that time period, healthcare economists noticed the rise in healthcare costs and regularly rang the alarm bells with increasing levels of concern.
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Why Healthcare Data Won’t Magically Create Value-Based Care
The conversation about transitioning the American healthcare system from fee for service (FFS) to value-based care (aka, pay for performance) has been going on for more than 15 years. Still, it felt like time travel to come across a Health Affairs book review from 2006 by the late Princeton Professor Uwe Reinhardt that could have been written last month. In evaluating what he describes as the “utopian vision” laid out in Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg’s Redefining Health
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Evaluating COVID-19’s Behavioral Health Impact on the Economy
We’re now in a new year and new presidential administration. At least three companies are producing effective COVID-19 vaccines, which are being administered to healthcare workers, teachers, and the elderly. By summer, hopefully a large majority of the population in most countries will be vaccinated. From where the world now stands, we can see an end to prolonged isolation, trauma, fear, grief, and economic torpor. But out of the woods, we are not. The virus mutates, perhaps
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Is Broadband Access The Missing Key to Improving Rural Healthcare?
The plain truth is that rural America has always had a market failure problem. In the 1930s, the problem manifests as woefully inadequate telephone and electrical service. The spaces were just too wide open, the potential customers too few, for companies to invest in America’s in-between places. In response to this market inefficiency, a federal government led by Franklin Roosevelt stepped in and created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Within 20 years, phone
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COVID-19 Hastens America’s Reckoning with Rural Healthcare
So long as we could say, “Healthcare is a business,” we could continue to avoid the moral and ethical choices from which such statements shield us. But then COVID-19 came into the picture and the bottom dropped out of healthcare as a business. Hospitals and health systems are hemorrhaging money; the American Hospital Association estimates total losses will exceed $300 billion by the end of the year. “The growing number of cases is threatening the very survival of hospitals just
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Why Hasn’t A More Holistic Approach to Patient Care Become The Norm?
When food production technology made it possible, wheat flour processors started to eliminate the tough exterior (bran) and nutrient-rich core (germ) of the kernel to get at the large, starchy part (the endosperm) only. The bread produced from this process is white and fluffy, and it makes great PB&Js and takes forever to grow mold, but it is almost totally lacking nutritional value. Nutrition experts eventually pointed this out, of course, after which commercial bakers tried fortifying
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COVID-19 Underscores Why Certain Aspects of the American Healthcare System Should Change Forever
In the late 1940s, the United Kingdom was busily reassembling country and what remained of the empire in the aftermath of World War II. Among many revelations, the war had convinced Britain’s leaders of the need to provide healthcare for all in the event of calamity upending the basic functions of a civilized society. With that, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was born. In 2020, all perspectives about quality and the time it takes to see a provider aside, the NHS remains quite popular
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