Covid is Collapsing Healthcare
"Slowly, then all at once"
I am a frequent consumer of healthcare. I have to see doctors all the time.
I moved to the Bay Area so that I could see really good doctors. It has been an excruciatingly expensive move that was supposed to be temporary, and has extended our budget far into the red as I got repeated Covid infections that pushed back my schedule for other care. (But, at least I was here to get excellent care for the Covid….I guess that’s a tiny silver lining.)
One of the top hospital systems in the country is UCSF. Let me tell you how it’s going at UCSF:
They’re not accepting new Primary Care patients, because so many providers left during Covid
UCSF has the #6 ranked Psychiatry department in the country, but they’re not accepting new Psych patients due to lack of providers
They have a top-ranked integrative care center, but the main intake doctor that coordinates care with all the sub-specialties has left, and they can’t find anybody to take their place. So…they’re not really taking new patients, either.
To repeat: this is one of the top hospitals in the country, and you literally can’t get treated there because they’re so severely understaffed.
Now, there are some workarounds, and after a year of effort I’m starting to get some of my appointments. But if this is how it is at a top hospital, imagine how it is all over the country. Imagine how it’s going back in Idaho — the state I moved out of — where gynecologists are leaving the state rather than risk imprisonment. And ER physicians are doing the same. It was hardly a healthcare wonderland before. Now what?
A recent study came out, estimating that the risk of contracting Long Covid is 38% by your third infection. But this risk is not hitting society evenly. People working in-person jobs such as healthcare, education, and transit are getting sick several times a year. Software engineers who are working from home and have no school-age children may avoid contracting it at altogether.
The thing is — and I say this as someone who worked in software for decades — we don’t really need most software. But we need healthcare. And childcare. And education. And the ability to get on a plane and be fairly certain the pilot will survive long enough to land us safely.
The people in all these fields are the people we’re infecting and reinfecting, mercilessly. But what starts out as cruelty to them will spread to affecting all of us. Pretty soon, more and more heart attacks and strokes and cases of appendicitis will just be death sentences — it will be too long a wait to get in to see someone at the ER before the damage is done. A society without functioning healthcare is not a society at all. It is a failed state. We are sending ourselves back to the 1850’s, and that doesn’t seem to bother us.
Now, if Covid were making it harder to go shopping, that might bother us.
I don’t know what to say about this. The solutions involve multi-pronged approaches that center the needs of the vulnerable, cost money, require honesty and transparency, and at best only mitigate rather than cure the problem. And our leadership has made it clear they’re happy to throw the vulnerable off a cliff for short-term denial and better stock market returns. Who cares how many people die, if it keeps their poll numbers up?
I care, but clearly, people who care aren’t being allowed to make decisions anymore.
But what I can say is this house of cards is crumbling very soon. 2030 at the latest; probably a lot sooner. America will be like a third world country at best, a failed state at worst.
It’s coming, and we’re not doing a damn thing to stop it.