This is what a successful health care system looks like

If a core goal of our nation is to have the healthiest population possible, then we need to rethink, regroup, and restore our commitment to health practices and processes that are aligned with this mission. We are currently investing our precious social and economic capital into a health care system that is wildly inefficient, too expensive, confusing, and failing most of us. As costs continue to spiral upward, the patient population is suffering from the growing burden of chronic disease (heart disease, diabetes, cancer), deaths of despair, the opioid crisis, and declining life expectancy as we are overfed and undernourished. To be fair, medical science has made technological advances, which has improved the lives of many individuals; however, for the broader population, we are failing miserably. The doctor-patient relationship is frail, strained, and continues to fray as “the system” weakens the bonds of trust. Doctors are time-starved (with the average patient visit being six minutes) as the promise of technology has not quite delivered on patient satisfaction nor outcomes. Procedures pay, and patient education does not. We have rising mental health issues, and physician and patient suicide rates are both at an all-time high. To say the least, we need a radical reboot to restore the health and wellbeing of our nation.

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