Paul Scherz in The Hedgehog Review:
To say that the American health-care system is in less-than-great working order may strike many as a colossal understatement. Yes, it functions well on the heroic-medicine front. It possesses incomparable medical technology and pharmaceuticals, and it can boast an impressive corps of well-educated and compassionate physicians, nurses, and other health-care workers. For all those strengths, however, American health care labors under mighty challenges, including an overstretched and underfunded public-health system, the increasing concentration of hospitals and even medical practices in the hands of for-profit businesses, and a patchwork health-insurance regime that leaves too many people inadequately covered and gives too much control to insurance-company executives and too little to health-care professionals.
Related to, and compounding, those and other problems is a consequential and arguably insidious paradigm shift—one that is moving medicine away from the guiding imperatives of patient care and the cure of illness to an overriding concern with the prediction of health risk, an approach dubbed, with no trace of modesty or irony, precision medicine.
More here.
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