To Fix America ’s Broken Health Care System, We Must Rethink Who Counts as an Expert

Americans are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic like survivors of a wildfire surveying an unfamiliar landscape. As we take stock of what’s left, we are forced to rebuild, but we need not simply restore what was taken in a hollow echo of what we knew before. We can make health care and the infrastructure that supports it better, stronger, more resilient. To do that, as we learned at great cost over the past 15 months, we must value all the stakeholders in the system: not just insurance executives and hospital CEOs, but patients, disabled people, older adults, low-income people, people of color who have faced historic health care discrimination, and health care workers and supporters, from home health aides to hospital registrars. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Millions of Americans interact with the health care system every year—if and when they can afford it. But discussions about health care reform often leave out some of these voices. Policy-makers, industry executives, hospital officials and others in high-status positions hear from others in similar roles, or from prominent members of the health care community like sought-after specialists who bring in high-value patients. Under-represented in these conversations are those who know the system at its worst, like ambulance crews making minimum wage, nurses in underfunded community health clinics and uninsured patients who know what it’s like to halve their insulin dose to stretch to the nex...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 feature Magazine Source Type: news