Most if not all of us, when we first began to work in the health care industry or on the provider side, we believed in our work for better patient care and a better health care system.  Over time, we recognized that our health care system was changing, becoming increasingly exploitative, while hiding behind a false mask of better patient care.

Early in my health care career, more than 30 years ago, I attended a meeting in which an executive of a health care company stated; “This party cannot last, we are going to have national health care.”  The “party” he was referring to was the exploitation of health care for revenues and profits.  That exploitation party has continued to the present, because no one said “stop.”  Not congress, not administrations, and certainly not the industry.

Daily media articles, websites, and reports bring transparency to the excessive costs of health care, medical debt, fraud and other malfeasance: New York Times’ “Staggering Rise in Catheter Bills Suggests Medicare Scam”, the Wall Street Journal’s “How Drug Middlemen Keep Beating the System”, and Bloomberg’s “Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work”, and many more.

The financial and patient costs of off-label marketing (from the National Library of Medicine), excessive drug advertising (from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), creation of monopolies (from the Wall Street Journal) and the opioid crisis are but a few of the many, the very many exploitations.

Is there a salesperson, marketer, or executive of an opioid manufacture, distributor, or retail pharmacy who did not know that opioids were being vastly over-prescribed and inflicting severe pain on families.  From 2010 to 2022, there were about 180,000 in overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (from the National Institute on Drug Abuse).  What about the many more who survived, but lost who they were.  Who from the industry stood up and said “stop.”

Medicare will be underfunded in 2036, social security in 2035.  The national debt is $35 trillion and annual federal deficits are $1.5 to $2 trillion.  

The exploitation party is over.

Everything forward and all the opportunities are for increasing the quality and delivery of health care, substantially reducing costs and making ever-increasing leaps in knowledge, cures, medical technologies and prevention of global health threats.

When Obama Care was first proposed, it was perceived as disruptive threat to the health care industry.  A representative of the health care industry stated; We knew that if we were not at the table, we would be on the menu. 

AI is a disruptive and constructive technology, not controlled by the health care industry.  You are already on the menu.  The proposed public private partnership, gives you a seat at the table with the ability to license the technologies your companies need to survive in the future.