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Abdul El-Sayed's avatar

Thanks for your leadership, doc!

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Sudeep Bansal, MD, MS's avatar

When thinking about making bold policy moves to solve healthcare problems, I think, we need to approach the problem from 2 angles:

1. How to provide medical care to people without bankrupting either people or the country - removing rent seekers, especially monopolies, is probably the easiest way (comparatively) to decrease cost and use the money saved to fund care, ban high deductible health plans and slowly start moving to Medicare for all, starting with allowing people to buy Medicare on health exchanges.

2. Increase the health of the people so they consume lower downstream costs - we don't spend enough on basic infrastructure needs which manifests in higher healthcare costs e.g. housing. Public health programs take decades to show improvement or decline (e.g. the current rhetoric on removing fluoride in water will manifest in 1-2 decades down the road when people have higher dental costs). I wrote about the role of socioeconomic/environmental factors in my article "From Doctors to Social Workers" https://www.pcplens.com/p/doctors-to-social-workers

Also, when we consider Medicare for All, we often forget that employees already pay for their healthcare through paycheck deductions. Converting that into a tax, may actually increase employee take home pay.

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