Medical Inequities

Alan and Andy work in different medical environments.  Alan works in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the county, one with many who are uninsured, undocumented, who have to work multiple jobs, who have limited food options, and who had the highest COVID mortality in the world.  Andy works in a middle class environment filled with tech-heavy white collared people, where good nutrition and exercise is common, smoking rates are among the lowest in the country, and the COVID death rates were extremely low.  In many ways, as Alan and Andy discuss, COVID put a microscope to how our nation's health inequities and profit-driven health priorities impact different people.  The haves tend to prosper, the have-nots are neglected.  Sometimes, as the Dartmouth Health Atlas shows us, the haves can be harmed by excessive specialization and medicalization; areas of the nation with the most specialists have a generally lower life expectancy, likely from over-reliance on doctors rather than lifestyle.  But the decision of our health care funders to finance high-cost low-yield medicine at the expense of health equity, nutrition, and basic care has led to a slanting of outcomes that is entirely preventable, where the have nots suffer from the very opposite problem: inadequate care and life style betterment.  We discuss how to fix this American made mess!