The Covid-19 pandemic was the best of times, the worst of times, for our healthcare system. We saw the ceaseless efforts of frontline doctors and nurses, working to contain an unprecedented plague. Yet, we also were reminded of the fragility of our medical system, buckling rapidly under the weight of a new disease, made worse by lack of access to quality care for many, and a population burdened by chronic diseases that have made Covid-19 so much worse.
Our healthcare system matters. How do we protect it?
We argue for three things.
First, we can adopt payment models which encourage health rather than sickness. We currently have a model which incentivizes providing ever-more expensive care for disease. It is a sick care system. We readily attend to people who present for care with symptoms; we are less skilled at improving health across entire populations. Models which shift the focus of market competition to keeping patients well have been explored in shelves’ worth of books and we here deflect away from specific ways to implement. But the fundamental concept: changing incentives from sickness cure to keeping health, seems to us indisputable. Put simply, the medical care system needs to embed public health practices.
Read the full post on The Turning Point.