What I do most and what I do best is medicine. Healthcare. So I began to write (this blog was created in 2009) as I saw the compassionate practice of medicine being threatened by a system that has perverse incentives, causing it to be crazily expensive and ever more inadequate. There was a great deal of debate surrounding equitable payment for medical care leading up to passage of the affordable care act. Much of the debate was uninformed, so I wrote things, from the point of view of a real doctor working with real patients in a variety of pretty normal places. I added some data to the roiling pot of data that is the internet. Threw virtual messages in bottles into the virtual ocean. There are 353 posts, around 2700 visits per month, a few more than 624,000 views over the life of the blog. Maybe some of those views influenced people in ways that made medicine more compassionate, more nuanced, equitable, effective and less ignorant, expensive and daft. When Covid hit, there was so much
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.