Leading health care providers in the United States are out of touch with the reality of ordinary Americans’ basic health needs, warns a leading public health expert.
dr Marty Makary, a public policy expert from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, told that America’s current public health establishment is lacking for the average person as the pandemic exposes some of the system’s flaws.
While officials have focused on Covid over the past two years, spending funds on tests, vaccines and treatments, other key issues affecting Americans every day have included nationwide obesity and diabetes epidemics and the rising cost of non-Covid -Care, completely ignored disappeared.
Makary highlights the disconnect and exorbitant costs Americans endure from a predatory and contentious medical system in his 2019 book, The Price We Pay, in which he traveled to 22 US cities across the country to over to report the gaps in the system.
dr Marty Makary (pictured) told in an exclusive interview that he believes there is a disconnect between health leaders and the general public in the US, which is costing Americans both their money and their health
“The real issues that concern our patients are not the issues that we really focus on in terms of research,” Makary explained in an interview.
He pointed to two particular major health events in the 21st century that explained the vast disparities between health intelligence and the layman.
First, it was Affordable Care (ACA), known by many as “Obamacare,” the 2010 law that expanded Medicaid in the US and added protection from pre-existing conditions to US healthcare, among other policies.
The science couldn’t keep up with the hectic news cycle surrounding the ACA, and the long process of conducting a study, peer reviewing, and publishing made it impossible for them to be a real factor in the real-time discussion of a massive shift in the world to be public health policy.
In The Price We Pay, 2019, Makary explores 22 US cities to learn how the average American interacts with the system and to identify where their needs are not being met
Meanwhile, reporters could quickly put together an informed story package by speaking to experts like Makary and publish a story that thousands would read, giving him the idea of bridging the gap between official research and mainstream media.
A decade later, COVID-19 broke out in the Eastern Hemisphere, first sweeping across China before making its way to Europe.
There was a time in February when the virus had not yet reached the US to the extent that it had hit other countries.
Makary notes that during this time, senior health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci simply told Americans not to cruise, while pundits he spoke to in Italy and China have instead warned that a tsunami is coming — and that the country must seriously start preparing .
“It was clear to me that our public health experts were asleep at the wheel,” he said, noting that he was among the first public health figures in the country at the time to issue urgent warnings about the pandemic.
He says while Americans need answers about Covid, how to protect themselves, their families and how dangerous the virus really is, many other experts are instead reluctant to disagree with public health officials like Fauci, even when the data goes the other way grasslands.
Makary said that at the start of the pandemic, many doctors and medical professionals called health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci (pictured) had relented, killing off intellectual debate and leading to groupthink
This failure to have an open intellectual discussion of these matters led officials to institute bad policies.
Two policies particularly bothered him. First, not allowing family members to see patients in the moments leading up to their death.
“Hospital visitation policies have been extremely draconian,” he said.
‘A human rights violation in my opinion. Who am I as a doctor to tell a 16 year old that he cannot accept the risk of contracting Covid to say a personal goodbye to his dying mother and hold her hand? I found that inhuman.”
He also said school closures are a failed policy that pulls children who are relatively safe from the virus out of the classroom, creating developmental and mental health issues with limited benefits.
Bur Makary’s main concern with the state of American healthcare, even before COVID-19 hit the world in 2020, was pricing.
In The Price We Pay, Makary visits local Americans in cities across the country to uncover the real issues plaguing the nation’s citizens.
The topics were broad, but mostly about money.
Whether it was clinics holding predatory health fairs at local churches, where they convinced people to get costly treatments for diseases they may not have, or the lack of price transparency in major US hospitals due to cat-and-mouse game between providers and insurers, money was at the root of everything.
An interesting but harrowing phenomenon uncovered by Makary and his research team at Johns Hopkins University was the practice of hospitals aggressively filing thousands of lawsuits against the patients they treated and for long periods of time garnishing wages to make simple procedures with exorbitant amounts of money pay inflated prices.
The biggest culprit was Carlsbad Medical Center in the small town of Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The hospital had sued almost everyone in town over medical bills, an issue Makary spotlighted in his book. He told that in the time since the book was published, the number of lawsuits filed has dropped by 80 percent.
Still, these high costs can discourage someone from seeking the care they need and contribute to the nearly one million preventable deaths Americans suffer each year.
This issue, Makary believes, has once again come to the forefront of public health policy during the pandemic, which has seen funds misused.
Federal officials have invested heavily in Covid tests, vaccines, therapeutics and masks over the past two years but haven’t seen much return on their investment.
Makary has criticized health officials for investing so much in COVID-19 testing for relatively healthy, asymptomatic people while ignoring other healthcare needs of Americans. Pictured: New Yorkers line up to get a COVID-19 test on Jan. 3
While American adults need the first two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, Makary has slammed the expense of providing young people with booster shots – which they likely didn’t need.
Instead, the funds could have been used to help people with cancer — which Makary says 40 percent spent either most or all of their savings on care.
Americans have trouble navigating the complex and opaque US healthcare system, and once they do, the costs can decimate life anyway.
But there are few resources to turn to for help, even as officials are spending billions of dollars to ensure drugs like Paxlovid are available to people who are likely to survive Covid anyway.
Another example of these mistakes he points to is big universities spending millions on Covid testing to get asymptomatic screening while their students struggle with mounting mental health problems and have nowhere to turn.
He describes much of what the government focuses on as “low-value care,” or an inefficient use of resources to help the greatest number of Americans in the most effective way.
Makary blames this disconnect between officials and the average citizen for the poor use of resources.
“I think the medical establishment needs to be pushed and challenged to think in new ways, and if they’re not pushed or challenged, they can fall into gutter and groupthink,” he said.
Makary also believes it’s a mistake for federal officials to buy millions of doses of Paxlovid and distribute it to people who are likely to survive Covid anyway
Throughout the book, Makary notes that when he attends major conferences attended by other major names in American healthcare—whether they are executives, academics, or other officials—many are unaware of the struggles faced by the average person are not aware.
Many didn’t even know what was going on at the company when asked directly by Makary.
He hopes his book, which was published before the COVID-19 pandemic but has become more relevant as it has, can help bridge the gap between the swanky conferences and the average citizen hoping to receive only the care he needs at an affordable price.
“The purpose of writing the book was to create a common public lexicon both within and outside the medical community to describe these practices in a way that we can address,” he explained.
“We recognized that if we really want to impact health education and public policy, we must do both and conduct rigorous scientific research, which is what we have published [medical journals] while speaking directly to physicians and the public through books and articles.’