Something Something Healthcare

If you missed this moving article last week by the perennially baseball-capped Gil Bashe over at Medika Life, then please have a read because his authenticity hits home hard.

For the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around how surprised many are when it comes to “Now is the time to something something.” As if it’s the first time we’re hearing about disparities in America regarding pretty much everything, let alone healthcare.

I’m old enough to remember the clinical and pharmaceutical sectors’ pre-Internet’s bemoaning of poor clinical trial enrollment statistics while blaming patients for not being their own advocates. Twenty years later, the bemoaning continues, only now we have fancy new semantics and acronyms like “SDOH.” to point fingers at instead.

(Dare we invoke Carlin’s bit about “Shell Shock,” “Battle Fatigue,” “Operational Exhaustion,” and “PTSD?”)

Failure to see past the choices we do not understand has only exacerbated myopia around the elephant in the room — how about involving the cost/benefit-driven human being (ahem *patient) at the end of the rope in the process?

So, while the Industry continues to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, I genuinely believe we are at a pivot for the first time since the turn of the century.

And this rural health initiative is an examplar of that pushback.

Consumer health and patient advocacy are colliding like two galaxies setting up a social movement with influence this country has not seen since Act Up — with the patient voice and the angry consumer leading the charge and not the other way around.

Guthrie was a poet and a forecaster. As Gil and Guthrie put it, and as most would agree, “this land was made for you and me.” But is it really?

Unless we turn off our devices more often, see each other beyond what the media manipulates us to think, and rise together, we have no right to complain. Don’t boo. Vote.

https://medika.life/rural-america-a-generational-struggle-for-health-equality/