Healthcare is an Airplane that Crashes and Kills Everyone on Board

Episode Takeaways

1. Hear from Dr. David B. Nash, Founding Dean Emeritus and full-time faculty as the Dr. Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon Professor of Health Policy at the Jefferson College of Population Health, who has co-authored a soon-to-be-released book titled, “How COVID Crashed the System: A Guide to Fixing Healthcare.”
2. As a young doctor, Dr. Nash noticed how the same patients would constantly be admitted and discharged, then admitted again. The same old treatments were leading to a revolving door, and he knew there had to be a better way: “I discovered that I was part of the whole structural racism story. We practiced on the poor and did the best we could, and I got great training, but there’s no question that we were practicing on the poor and disadvantaged in Philadelphia … one quarter of our population in this great city lives in poverty. None of that was evident to me. This was all eye-opening.”
3. Healthcare is an airplane that crashes and kills everyone on board. We have to be the NTSB investigators looking for the black box, but in reality, we already know what’s in the box: all the failures of the health system to promote health, provide for primary care, and reduce inequities and error. We have an obligation to find a way to fix the plane and get it back in the air.
4. We have to look at what’s happened and how we might fix it. With the benefit of historical perspective about the evolution of the modern post-war American health system from innovation to the rise of community-based healthcare to the advent of telemedicine and the rise of generic medicine and affordable care, we have to look at where we’ve gone wrong and failed so tragically during the pandemic so we can be better in the future.