On Monday, Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal came to Cornell to talk about her experiences reporting on healthcare and its many problems. Trained as a doctor, Dr. Rosenthal became a journalist for The New York Times. As a journalist, she covered many stories relating to healthcare and health policy. Her talk mostly focused on the problems in the American healthcare system. She discussed how arbitrary the costs of healthcare can be. For example, she mentioned how a drug that combined two products in one cost much more than both of the drugs separately. Therefore, patients that were prescribed the joint drug paid much more unnecessarily. In another story, she described the experience of a man who had a minor injury but ended up going to the hospital in an ambulance. Because the hospital did not know the extent of the injury, they had dispatched an unnecessary trauma team to meet the ambulance. Even though the patient did not need the team, he was still billed an exorbitant amount for it.
This talk really made me reflect upon the problems in the field I hope to go into. There seems to be a paradox that in a field that quite literally deals with life or death, some people can’t afford to chose life. That being said, doctors and other healthcare professionals usually go through rigorous training and schooling that takes a lot of time and money. They should be justly compensated for that. However, no one should be in a situation in which they can’t pay for a treatment that could save their lives. Hopefully, with efforts from citizens, state governments and the national government will be able to balance these two sides so that the healthcare system as well as the people it serves will be able to be supported.
This is a really interesting view of Healthcare. The purpose is to help people afford the medical bills related to any injury, yet it stills ends up being so pricy that many people push off going to the hospital. Additionally, they tend to be overzealous in checking the health of people. This counteracts the help that the hospital can provide, because it tends to be pricer than what many people can afford, even when they have Healthcare, so they avoiding going.
America’s Healthcare system and what changes are trying to be made, is an interesting contrast to Canada’s healthcare system, which provides sufficiently, so that the doctors are compensated and the citizens are able to afford what they have to pay. While we have a working system nearby, most people seem unable to acknowledge that it is effective and a way to improve US healthcare is to emulate Canada’s.
I also found all the anecdotes Rosenthal provided very insightful; the stark comparison between foreign health care and the United States’ perfectly exemplified the problems with the privatization of what some believe should be the public sector.
Rosenthal is obviously highly esteemed in her field, and her work as both a journalist and doctor add to her credence on the topic. If she believes that healthcare is a conflict in today’s society, I do not think anyone would disagree.
This was a very interesting piece and I wish I had the opportunity to attend this speech. Both of my parents are doctors and care deeply about the healthcare policies that America has to offer. To me, it seems as if doctor’s recommend certain drugs or treatments to receive more money, even when there are alternate ways to help patients. The cost alone causes many people to fear going to the hospital, even at necessary times. Perhaps we should take a closer look at Canada’s practices to help treat our patients.