Prioritizing Our Health:

Simple Version: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

My Unfiltered Thoughts: If you measure the wrong thing, you do the wrong thing.

When we focus on health insurance coverage instead of focusing on improving actual health, we, predictably, will not see much improvement in health. While I support Medicare for all over the alternative of fully privatized and extractive health care industries, I think even M4A is missing the larger picture, which is that even with government health insurance, hospital’s costs are not subject to the moderating forces of competition in an open marketplace. The market has failed in this industry. We pay more than any other country for worse results.

Priorities:

  • Introduce competition to the industry by giving localities federal funding to build free/at cost community clinics and hospitals. This will rapidly drive down costs and expand treatment options.

  • Our regulatory watchdogs in the medical-pharmaceutical arena are now the archetypal examples of captured, subservient lapdogs. We must rebuild these agencies with more inherent checks and balances, including limiting private sector revolving doors. We must provide vastly more public funding for the research into unprofitable but effective treatments.

  • I believe we must accept that SarsCov2 is an endemic virus (has become a part of nature which we cannot feasibly remove) that humans must learn to live with intelligently, with the aim of rendering future mutations less virulent through improving access to safe and affordable treatments, careful exposure of the healthy to virus, and the continued commonsense protection of the vulnerable. I agree with the world class scientists comprising the Great Barrington Declaration (Harvard, Stanford and Oxford’s senior epidemiologists) who acknowledge that focused protection of the vulnerable need not come at great cost to our economy, democracy, education, individual rights, or social fabric.

    Furthermore, we must create clear standards to measure how transmissible and lethal a disease must be before governments or health authorities have any legal basis to implement drastic public health measures such as lockdowns, mandates, propaganda, or similar restrictions.

  • Much of what drives enormous costs in the healthcare field are treatments given to people like my grandma Bridget. She was in her 80s, when she died of lung failure. Weeks of hospice care in a hospital can be incredibly costly, and often the treatments offered promise nothing but the hope of a few more weeks or months of living that bears no resemblance to life. I don’t know how government can influence this very delicate subject, but I know if we could accept our mortality better, as a culture, we would probably also live more fully, and die more gracefully. I am open to medically assisted suicides in the context of people who still have their faculties and wish to die in dignity.

My influences: Dr John Iionides (Stanford), Dr Suneptra Gupta (Oxford), Dr Martin Kuldorf (Harvard), Dr Jay Battacharia (Stanford) Dr Vannay Prassad (UCSF), Dr Marty Macary (Johns Hopkins)