As a tentative pre-med student, I decided to take Sean Nicholson’s “The U.S. Health Care System” course in order to familiarize myself with how the U.S. health care system works in relation to other countries. So when I heard that he would be presenting at the Rose Cafe, I thought it would be interesting to hear more about some of the topics he has discussed in our class.

From the perspective of someone who, leading up to this moment, did not know much about the U.S. health care system and how it works/is run, it’s very eye-opening to see all the different components of healthcare and how they all fit in together with other elements of healthcare and elements of society that aren’t even directly correlated to healthcare. For example, Professor Nicholson brought up the fact that Amazon may be able to start delivering our pharmaceutical goods in the near future. It seemed that he really emphasized pharmaceuticals and pharma firms which seem to be the sectors of healthcare that common citizens are most interested in (probably as a result of lots of direct-to-consumer advertising). In terms of the future of healthcare in the U.S., after this talk, it seems to me like there will continue to be expensive healthcare here in the U.S. in comparison to other high-income countries.