Follow the Money: Childhood Health Care Disparities Magnified by COVID-19

The resilient phenotype: Physicians who thrive despite adversity

“…Major institutions shamelessly cherry-pick lucrative procedures, depriving less affluent facilities of needed funds and exacerbating care disparities. 2 Our piecemeal reimbursement system both rewards and normalizes these behaviors. Altruistic practitioners who entered medicine to help people are often caught in this profit-driven meat grinder, typically with little meaningful input into far-reaching decisions that affect patient care and contribute to physician burnout.…”

“…Efforts to control the resulting high costs, in turn, often lead to questionable documentation requirements and wasted physician time spent pleading for approval of necessary diagnostic studies or treatments. Major institutions shamelessly cherry‐pick lucrative procedures, depriving less affluent facilities of needed funds and exacerbating care disparities 2 . Our piecemeal reimbursement system both rewards and normalizes these behaviors.…”

Predatory Health Care: Putting Lipstick on a Pig

“…We thank Dr. Klunk for his thoughtful comments about our essay. 1 We wanted to make people think and to stimulate discussion, and it is great to see that we succeeded. We focused on the effect of predatory hospital business practices on health care delivery and how the COVID-19 pandemic magnified the negative effects of these practices.…”

Health Care: Neither Right, Privilege nor Commodity

“…In a March editorial, Pavlakis and Roach wrote, “As long as health care is considered a commodity instead of a basic right, it will be susceptible to market forces and to efforts to maximize profits.” 1 While appealing, labeling health care as a right without acknowledgement of what that right entails, how it generates reciprocal obligations, and how that label frames advocates for other approaches to improving healthcare as unsupportive of human rights is fraught. This approach precludes discussion of the desirability of a universal health care system (UHS); instead, declaring it must be so.…”