Yesterday I read an article by Ezekial Emanuel, a professor and former adviser to President Obama on health care policy. Dr. Emanuel is a very nuanced thinker and had some great ideas around the time that the Affordable Care Act was crafted. He speaks out about how rising healthcare costs stem from inefficiencies, wasted testing and treatment and perverse incentives that encourage us to do what is expensive and ineffective rather than what is cheap and effective. He tells difficult truths. So I read his article, "The Inevitable Reimagining of Medical Education" in February 27, 2020 JAMA magazine with great interest. Medical school is painful and expensive and produces some pretty bad doctors so could definitely benefit from some reimagining! I learned that medical education is already being changed in ways that are hard to imagine and that it may become nearly unrecognizable. To which I initially said hooray, but am reconsidering. Medical school, when I attended it in ...
The cost of health care in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, and yet we are not healthier than our peer nations. In fact, in terms of such measures as infant mortality and life span, we don't measure up. Why is this? Many people involved in providing or receiving care have some pretty good ideas about what costs so much, and what we can do to reduce costs and improve quality. Sharing these stories is an important step in creating affordable universal health care.