Stephan: One of the main things 2022 and the pandemic should have taught politicians is that American healthcare sucks compared with that of other developed nations, as reported in dozens of social outcome studies in the professional academic literature. If you read SR regularly you know this from the many papers, articles and reports I have published. It's not the personnel, the doctors, nurses, and technicians; it is the way the system is economically structured so that its only priority is profit. Wellbeing is hardly a factor.
Join me in making this New Year's resolution: However, and whenever you can smile and lean in the direction of universal, birthright, single-payer health with fostering wellbeing as its top priority you will do so. The illness profit system will not change until Americans make it clear that creating a system that promotes wellbeing will determine how that vote.
A healthcare worker comforts a patient at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, in 2020. Credit: Mark Felix / AFP / Getty
Though the pandemic and all its attendant health care crises remained the major health care story of 2022, churning all the while in the background has been the critical work of academic scholars, operating on longer timelines, who are still trying to make sense of US health care and of medicine itself, to get a better idea of what’s wrong and how to make it better.
To wrap up this year, I asked a couple dozen health policy experts what research released this year (though, as one of them reminded me, these papers are often years in the making) had surprised them, changed their thinking, or struck them as especially notable.
Here are five particularly interesting papers, at least in my view. Because many more than that warrant mention, I have tried to cram in as many references to other work as I could. One of my lessons from this exercise was that there are […]
Albus Eddie
on Monday, December 26, 2022 at 5:56 am
I liked the term “Ghost doctors”. This has been an issue in the Mental health community for decades with managed care plans who have panels filled with “Ghost Therapists” and “Ghost psychiatrists”. Given the breath and longevity of the problem it appears to be a RICO issue, and until it is addressed in that fashion I would not expect meaningful change.
I totally agree with you Stephan!
I liked the term “Ghost doctors”. This has been an issue in the Mental health community for decades with managed care plans who have panels filled with “Ghost Therapists” and “Ghost psychiatrists”. Given the breath and longevity of the problem it appears to be a RICO issue, and until it is addressed in that fashion I would not expect meaningful change.