Being the chief executive officer of a hospital means being part business leader and part politician, requiring a blend of diplomacy, advocacy, business management, and financial sense. And the stakes of this role aren’t just profit and loss, but life and death ..read more

Alongside HHS and still within the Department of Commerce, one finds the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The BEA is responsible for producing economic statistics in general. They contribute to measuring healthcare spending as part of their calculation of GDP as a whole—the healthcare sector just happens to entail one-fifth of that total amount. They coordinate closely with NHEA and CMS on these calculations ..read more

In late 2015, nearly 200 governments worldwide signed a landmark action plan known as the Paris Agreement. After decades of blame-shifting, disorganization, and avoidance, there was finally a formal acknowledgment of the shared nature of climate change and a unified effort toward tackling the mounting crisis ..read more

The American healthcare system has a problem with trust. According to the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), research has shown a significant decline in physicians’ trust in healthcare leaders during the Covid-19 pandemic and notable differences between how physicians and the public perceive trust. Further, experiences of discrimination also negatively affect trust in US healthcare ..read more

The debate over whether healthcare should be treated as a business or a right has gone on for decades. Both sides have a similar end goal, and that is for our nation to boast a healthy population of generally productive individuals without bankrupting itself in the process. The disagreement is mostly in how to achieve the goal ..read more

Classism in healthcare is a pervasive issue that significantly impedes access to quality treatment and care. The socioeconomic status of individuals often dictates the standard and frequency of healthcare they receive. This systemic bias typically involves prejudices, attitudes, and actions favoring the higher socioeconomic classes while marginalizing those in the lower strata of society ..read more

Access and affordability are closely interlinked concepts used for evaluating the sector's effectiveness overall. Within healthcare, effectiveness covers metrics ranging from dollar spend to inclusivity scores. Not only is the range of possible variables quite vast, but the relationships between and among data points are also meaningful. This adds a layer of complexity and an opportunity for a deeper understanding into the “why” of how events unfold ..read more

An October 2020 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that nearly six out of ten Black Americans trusted the nation’s healthcare system only some or almost none of the time to do what was right for their communities. That mistrust is understandable: the nation’s healthcare system has a long history of mistreating its non-white racial and ethnic communities. Mistreatment ranges from the overt racism of Tuskegee to the more insidious disparities in care received from community to community and patient to patient ..read more

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a profound number of people are ageist: half of the global population. This staggering statistic reveals how prevalent discrimination against older adults is and how insidious. Psychologists have called it the last socially acceptable form of discrimination ..read more

Medical mistreatment and the mistrust it engenders isn’t confined to history, nor is it limited to the Black population: today, women, people of color, Native Americans, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community experience minor or major discriminations that justifiably leave them distrustful of traditional healthcare services ..read more