Healthcare Right Now

Copy of What the Health is Going On?

• Sue • Season 1 • Episode 1

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A discussion on the US healthcare system and how you can optimize your healthcare.

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Sue:

ello. Welcome to everyone listening or watching this show. This is Healthcare right now. The show where we explore. What the health is going on.

Sue:

It is crazier and crazier out there in the world, and healthcare is no exception.

Sue:

Every time I turn around, there's a new illness cropping up.

Sue:

We have a new controversial health secretary. Our chickens are being killed to prevent bird flu.

Sue:

The Price of eggs has gone way up because of it, and on and on. So let's get into it.

Sue:

My name is Sue. I'm a registered nurse and I have 20 plus years of healthcare experience in the nursing field. I have been a CNA and LPN and A DN, and now I am A BSN. I have worked in numerous fields of nursing, including long-term specialty dementia care. Physical rehabilitation, nursing, medical, surgical nursing, telemetry, ER and ICU.

Sue:

That means that I can help you understand and navigate some of the complexities of our healthcare system in the United States. My biggest goal is to help you not only understand the issues, but to navigate the healthcare system as it is in its current state, to optimize your access and utilization of the system. But we're also gonna advocate for the system getting better.

Sue:

I love my job and I love the people I serve. I believe in nursing and I believe in advocating for the health of individuals and our community as a whole. I think that nursing is one of the ways that I can spread love into the universe.

Sue:

Healthcare is a need that everyone has from the moment of conception until their final breath. You need healthcare and it's difficult and weird to access in the United States. So that's something we're gonna talk about too.

Sue:

Why am I doing this now? Because it is crazy out there. It has been so hard to keep up with the changes hitting us every single day. And I was an IACU nurse during COVID. That was wild. I'd come to work every day and I'd think. What's gonna change today? What's gonna be the weird new rule? What's gonna be the new PPE that they're telling me I have to wear? What's gonna be the new guidelines? Because it changed every single day. I'm sure you can all relate.

Sue:

I know a lot of you in the community were very frustrated with the CDC and how they said one thing and then they took it back. Well, that went tumble for healthcare workers and it was. Very, very frustrating. I'll be honest. And I hope that the CDC has learned a lot from that and that we all learn a lot because another pandemic will hit us. It's just inevitable.

Sue:

But, I really thought things would calm down after Covid VID and they did. For like a second, but now there's just so much healthcare news every single day and we're all just grasping, trying to hold on to what we know and what we need to know and how it's gonna affect us all. And it can be a really scary time.

Sue:

Every day I ask myself what the health is going on. So some of the issues that we're talking about, we have RFKA lawyer. Uh, an accused vaccine denier is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. How does that affect healthcare? There was a United Healthcare, CEO recently gunned down. People speculate that could have to do with claim denials. There's been a revelation that insurance companies are using AI to deny claims in less than five seconds.

Sue:

There's a measles outbreak in the United States with a child dying just a short time ago, and there was an adult as well in the US this is a disease that we nearly eradicated in the early two thousands through vaccination, and now it's back and we have over 300 cases. And the majority of those cases, the vast majority, were unvaccinated people. So that tells you how important vaccines are and how important getting information to the public is.

Sue:

There was a small tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas. In the United States, we have done a fantastic job in the United States of keeping TB outside of our borders. But you have to understand that the way that we have done that is extremely rigorous public health and safety measures.

Sue:

If you guys think that the covid restrictions were too bad and that they impeded your freedom. Hold onto your hats 'cause we're gonna do an episode on TB sometime and you're gonna understand that those covid restrictions were nothing in light of the TB restrictions that have always been in place. You just were unaware of them. But they're so important because they have kept TB beyond our borders, which is a disease that has such a high death rate you guys. And, we are having success in treating with antibiotics, but. It is a six month long course of antibiotics to treat that disease. The antibiotics that we're using, there's begun to be resistance to those. And these are not your garden variety antibiotics.

Sue:

This is not a Z-pack from the doctor that you barely noticed you took for five days and you barely noticed any side effects. Maybe your tummy hurt a little bit, but uh, no. These are heavy hitting antibiotics that we do not use for other healthcare issues because they have serious side effects. Things like ototoxicity, that's when it affects your hearing. Maybe you could have hearing loss from taking an antibiotics. I don't know if you've ever considered that, but that's an issue. With, some of these treatments that they're very severe and have very serious side effects.

Sue:

Another issue, there's been data leaks of sensitive health documents. There's cuts coming to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and I want you to understand the scope of this. This is not a political commentary. I know a lot of people feel some sort of way about Medicare and Medicaid and social Security being an entitlement program. This, that, and the other thing, I'm not here to comment on any of that. What I am here to comment on is the scope of this in our healthcare system and how that is going to affect us and how it will affect someone that you know.

Sue:

Let's go over some statistics. There are 72 million Americans that receive Medicaid insurance. Medicaid is meant for kids and for younger people. Pregnant women use this a lot and people with disabilities. 72 million Americans receive Medicaid insurance making it the largest insurer in the United States, and that is a statistic from the Commonwealth Fund. Medicaid pays for 40% of all births in the United States. And if you go to rural areas, Medicaid pays for 50% of births in rural communities. That's a statistic from the American Hospital Association. I'll post all these in the notes. You can look.

Sue:

69 million Americans receive Social security every month. That's a statistic from the Social Security Administration. 67 million Americans receive Medicare now that is for our elderly people. So, if you add up all these numbers of people who are on these programs, that is 208. Million Americans who could be affected by cuts to these programs, what are they gonna do? Where are they going to turn for healthcare? Will that affect our system? How will these people access care? Will they be going to the emergency rooms? Will we pay for that in the long run?

Sue:

Anyway, these are all really good questions that Americans should be asking. And what about compassion in the United States? What about, all these births? Is it going to affect births if we take these away from pregnant women and or maybe they have a harder time accessing this care, prenatal care, birth care?

Sue:

We all know that medical expenses in the United States can cripple someone. And if you take someone who is a pregnant young woman who doesn't have insurance, who is lower income and needs to be on Medicaid. And I understand that that's 40 to 50% of women in America are in that situation. Now you saddle them with a medical debt. What if they need a cesarean? It is thousands and thousands of dollars because you're not only paying for the birth process, but you're paying for the OR and all the aftercare and the antibiotics that you need to receive for that surgery. So you could saddle a new mom who doesn't have the resources with a medical bill that could put her in financial ruin right from the start.

Sue:

Moving on to other issues. We have a population that's overweight and full of chronic disease. One in five American adults are overweight. We have a shortage of nurses and doctors. We have healthcare worker violence facing us. A recent US News article pointed out that eight out of 10 nurses report that they have been victims of workplace violence, and all nurses report that workplace violence has been increasing in the last few years, especially since COVID. We have an American population that is angry and upset about a lot of things that happened in healthcare and. That has spilled over onto nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists, and all the people who work in a hospital and in the medical field in general. The anger has spilled over to them and it's not their fault that any of these things are happening, but people are angry. It's become normalized and acceptable, and I'm here to say it's not okay and we need to do something about it.

Sue:

We have a lack of mental healthcare, coupled with the most depressed and anxious generation of young people in American history. Women's healthcare issues have been thrust to the forefront after the fall of Roe versus Wade, and however you feel about that, that is an issue.

Sue:

We have a diabetes epidemic, diabetes.org. Stats show that 1.2 million people in the United States are diagnosed with diabetes every year. The vast majority of those cases are type two diabetes, which can be preventable for most of those people. Some of those people will get type two no matter what we do because of genetics, et cetera, but the vast majority can be prevented. So what is America doing? What are we all doing? To address this issue because it does affect us all.

Sue:

When you look at cost of healthcare and the economic situation of America, the two are tied. We have 97.6 million people that are diagnosed with pre-diabetes every year in the United States. That's a lot of people, and diabetes is very livable disease. I don't want to make diabetes sound like it's the worst thing in the world. It is a chronic illness, but it has so many risk factors that are attached with it and so many lifestyle modifications, and if we can avoid it. That's the better option.

Sue:

We also have an opioid crisis. An article from PubMed illustrates that the United States has the highest rate of opioid consumption per capita. The United States also experiences the highest number of opioid related deaths in the world. That's not a great stat. It's not a great look guys.

Sue:

We also have a bird flu pandemic that's causing birds to fall over dead and chickens to be called at very high rates. There's been crossover to cows and there has been crossover to people already, though it has not been demonstrated to be transmissible from one person to the next. There have been at least 67 human cases and there was one human death, and there's so much more.

Sue:

Each of these issues frankly, deserves one to five episodes on its own merit. But today we are just going to touch on a few of these issues just to get the ball rolling. And my hope is that no matter what issue we are talking about, I can educate you on that issue and what you can do. For your own health.

Sue:

So the current state of healthcare in America, where are we at? I grew up hearing that the United States was the best healthcare system in the world. That people from other countries wanted to come here to America to receive care because we were both more advanced in our technology and because we weren't a publicly funded system, so we had less wait times, and you could see the doctors you wanted to see.

Sue:

What do you think? Did you ever think that America's system was the best in the world? Do you still think that? What makes you think that? What makes a system the best? What metrics are we using to measure that?

Sue:

Figuring out what makes the best healthcare system in the world involves looking at many different things. So people who research this consider access to care quality of the services offered patient outcomes. How cost effective the system is, overall health of the population being studied, innovation, technology, research programs, how happy patients are with the care they're receiving, whether everyone has fair and equal access to healthcare, the life expectancy of the nation, infant and maternal mortality rates, how chronic disease is managed. Preventative services and the administrative burden on that healthcare system.

Sue:

So, who decides It's usually really big. Institutions and organizations are the ones who rank and research these. They evaluate these healthcare systems worldwide based on metric data. Some of the key players are the World Health Organization, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, the Commonwealth Fund, the Legum Institute, and various other research institutions and universities. They gather data, they do surveys. They analyze how different countries are doing.

Sue:

So where does the US sit guys? We are not even on the top 10 of most of these lists. To be very fair to the United States. Many nations are not that far behind us. And a lot of these metrics, when you look at, a resource like health system facts.org, that's one of the sites that I used when I was researching this. Particularly in healthcare costs, healthcare costs have been rising globally over the past decade and other high income nations such as Germany and Austria, pay quite a bit in healthcare costs per capita and out of pocket as well.

Sue:

But Americans do spend the most on healthcare per capita, and we spend the most on pharmaceuticals worldwide. I think that you feel that every time you go to the pharmacy, particularly if you use certain drugs, there is drug tears, and we'll talk about that sometime in another episode. But there's certain tiers of medication that are just so very expensive. It is insane. America has been behind on all of these metrics for several decades at least, and the gap seems to be growing.

Sue:

So why is healthcare so important on a grand scale? Because it is the strength of a nation. Healthy mothers bear, the most biologically viable offspring. They have less birth effects. They are carried to term so they don't have lifelong health burdens that often plague premature babies, and they are overall stronger and more able to withstand the dangerous first few years of life when humans are just ridiculously vulnerable compared to other species on this planet. Those healthy offspring, if given healthcare to support their growth and development can grow into the most productive. Of societies,

Sue:

a nation filled with healthy youth is more innovative and flexible. Because they are not burdened with chronic healthcare concerns, which take up a lot of time to manage and a lot of mental energy. If you are spending all of your time thinking about your blood sugar levels or other things like that, and when are you have to take your next shot or when do you have to do this, or when do you have to take your next pill? That's a lot of mental energy that you are not spending on becoming an entrepreneur or on on your job that's currently, you know. Coming up with some out of the box idea, you're worried about your health.

Sue:

A nation that is filled with healthy adults and healthy elderly people has less costs as a society as a whole. Chronic disease costs Americans money. So here's a quote, the total cost of chronic disease in the United States reaches $3.7 trillion every year, approximately 19.6% of the country's gross domestic product. And 99% of Medicare and 80% of Medicaid spending went towards the treatment of chronic disease as of 2010. And that's an old statistic, but I couldn't find a newer one. That is from the American Action Forum.

Sue:

This costs us a lot of money. We can be a more productive society If we're healthier, that means more gross domestic products. That means our nation is doing better. That means our economy is doing better, that spills over to everyone, and that rising tide will flow. All boats healthy adults are more productive. They contribute more to the society that they are living in. They generate more revenue, they pay more taxes. They have more money to spend on non-healthcare related costs, which contributes to the economy

Sue:

being healthy affects our national security, and I want you to hear me out on this. A nation filled with healthy young people is a nation ready to defend itself. A nation that is vaccinated is resistant to outside attack and has children that grow into healthy adults. An army that is vaccinated is one that is ready to face war with the healthiest troops possible. It is my fervent belief that vaccination is a form of patriotism and that goes back as far as George Washington. So we will talk about that.

Sue:

If you don't believe me that a healthy nation is a strong nation is one that's ready to defend themselves, I want you to consider. Napoleon's Army. Napoleon's army was considered nearly unstoppable. It had swept through Europe, but Napoleon's army was largely defeated by a microorganism, not the Russians. And the early 18 hundreds and Army that was rolling over the entire continent was taken out by a bacterium. Let me quickly explain. In the 18 hundreds, Napoleon marched into Russia with an army of. 550,000 or so troops, that's a huge amount of troops. Sources vary.

Sue:

By the time of their defeat, only 30,000 were left alive, and of that number, only a thousand were left fit for duty. And this was brought on by large scale typhus, spread by lice, combined with hunger and cold in the Russian winter. But largely typhus had had weakened these troops. Infectious disease has taken out armies and has been used as a weapon in our own country. As we saw with smallpox used against indigenous peoples not having large scale immunity will take down an army and will take down an entire people group Plague is often credited as having an oversized hand in the fall of the Roman Empire.

Sue:

So understand that mass population health is essential to keeping a nation's cost low, to being ready for defense and the overall wellness of any economy. People who are not well enough to work often eventually become financially dependent on the government creating a drain on resources where if they were able to remain healthy due to education. And the healthcare system they lived in, they could still be productive members of society.

Sue:

Disease has large macro and microeconomic effects that must be considered in any society and in any financial system. On a micro scale, it's the quality of life for you and the ones you love. What do you want your life to look at? What do you want your life to look like a decade from now, two to three decades from now? how many years do you think that you are going to live? What are those years going to look like for you? Are you going to be sick and disabled for a large portion of those years? Are you or someone you love going to be bankrupted by medical debt? Are you going to be able to beat cancer by detecting it early and getting excellent treatment and then return to be a productive member of society? Or will you not be able to access preventable care and time or not be able to afford the treatments you need and tragically die before your time or will you get partially better and remain dependent on the government for your care?

Sue:

So let's all think about this. I want us to all really think about this. Is healthcare a right? We are currently torn between two diametrically opposed political parties. One party currently holds all the power, but as we have seen, that can change in any election cycle. So these issues go beyond one presidency beyond one political party.

Sue:

For my part. I don't particularly care for either party at this time. They have traveled so far left and so far right on most of the issues that people like me who are standing in the middle, I can't even see that far left or right anymore. Both parties have ideas about healthcare and how it should be handled by the government. I just want what's best for the American people. One side wants universal healthcare because healthcare is a right.

Sue:

How do you feel about that when you hear that? Some people say, no one owes me anything. Some people say that the government must provide a basic standard of living for its citizens. Just like it provides basic schooling for its citizens because we all recognize that an educated population is a population that has an edge over another population, right? I think that that's the same with healthcare, a healthy population. Has an advantage on a global stage. A healthier nation is a stronger nation. That's just true. I want you to really think about that.

Sue:

What does society or the government owe you? What do you owe society or the government you live under? What is the social contract or what should be the social contract? These are actually really weighty questions that formulate the backbone of our society, and we don't ever think about it until we're just thinking about one issue that's very polarizing. We're gonna do an entire episode on universal healthcare, ver versus private insurance, I promise. But it's a really weighty topic, and I do land in the middle on a lot of the issues at hand.

Sue:

I really think there should be a third party in America at this point because. The moderate view is just not represented in any sort of fashion. The other political party thinks that social wellness programs are bloated and are draining American resources. Is that true? Is that how you feel about the issue? What do you think? What do you think will happen if we don't have social support? What's going to happen to America when this social safety net is gone? are you really gonna save money as an American citizen if these programs get cut? Do you think that your taxes will go down as a result? What or who will fill the gap? For the 200 million Americans who are currently receiving assistance, what will they do? Where will they go? How will they live?

Sue:

We have to consider that before we just cut this. Where will the government put that money instead? Where will they put that money to make us stronger and to make us a more healthy nation? And I promise that this whole podcast would be, what can you do about any of this?

Sue:

It's really hard with this first episode because it's just an intro and we have not deeply discussed any issues. But I will leave you with this. Start to think about health in America. Think about what a healthy America looks and feels like. What needs to happen to make that vision a reality?

Sue:

What do you expect out of your politicians to make that happen? So what are a couple of practical things you can do in our current healthcare system? One is try to obtain healthcare insurance the best you can, either through a job or through the healthcare marketplace. Because having a healthcare issue in America can bankrupt you and I really feel like you should be protected from that.

Sue:

And the other is get a primary care physician. Episode two will be all about why you need a primary care physician. Let's leave it with this. American healthcare is changing every day. I'm gonna try to churn out some content as much as I can because it is absolutely so difficult to keep up with right now.

Sue:

You are not powerless in this vast system. There are ways you can navigate the system to try to optimize your health outcomes, and I am going to try to share those with you every single episode.

Sue:

Stay as informed as possible. But please use credible sources and use more than one source of information. Use multiple sources of information so you can see more than one side of the the issue.

Sue:

Thank you so much for listening, everyone. I am going to be working hard every day reviewing information to get it out to you and give you any resources that I can. Please like this podcast and subscribe to get the latest news in healthcare right now so you can know what the health is going on. See you next episode where we're gonna talk about primary care physicians. Thank you.