How improving our healthcare system can support a healthier country
This piece was co-written with Dr Nason Maani.
In last week’s piece, we started to address the question of “What would it take to Make America healthy again?”— discussing what it would mean to hold a new administration accountable to its word to do just that, and offering some specific ideas building on its stated goals toward this aspiration. We started by outlining the scope of the challenge of poor health in this country and then discussed how we might center prevention to improve health. Here we will talk about addressing how we might tackle the challenges and shortcomings of treatment, and specifically of the healthcare industry itself, to the end of improving health.
When considering how we might improve healthcare, an industry that accounts for more than 17% of the country’s GDP, it might be worth recognizing that there is much about healthcare that is not working well. For example, there is the sheer opacity of the system. In his first term, President Trump called for more transparency in healthcare. That seems worthwhile and we could start by honestly acknowledging the long-term challenges that have plagued how we deliver healthcare in the U.S. Although the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, it has been by many metrics the sickest high-income country for many decades. While this is, in large part, because of a lack of focus on preventing disease in this country, it also reflects the need to improve our healthcare system to secure a better return on our massive investment in it.
It is therefore reasonable to say that we do indeed need to improve how we deliver healthcare, and that, to date, successive administrations have failed to do so, at great fiscal and human cost, and this is far from a recent consequence of COVID-19 alone but reflects both acute and chronic failures. How, then, might we go about improving the healthcare industry?
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