Alice Walton’s prescription for a ‘broken’ US health system
Alice Walton’s prescription for a ‘broken’ US health system
www.semafor.com
Alice Walton’s prescription for a ‘broken’ US health system
7 comments
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The world’s wealthiest woman has a blunt diagnosis of the sickness she has set out to cure. “Health care is going to break and bankrupt American companies, and America itself, if we don’t change it,” Alice Walton says in a forceful Southern drawl.
Ah yes, of course. This has nothing to do with helping people get care or promoting things to keep them healthy so they don’t fall ill, etc. How twisted.
This reads like a PR press release written to present itself as philanthropy when it’s nothing more than corporate strategy designed to keep the have-nots from bankrupting billionaires. Fuck her.
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Wealthiest woman in world with no medical background has an idea for how to fix healthcare.
Why finally accept we should be modeling ourselves after other developed countries that figured this out decades ago? This is America. When all else fails, just buy the system and turn it into a Walmart .
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If you dig into it, she's trying to create this holistic, patient-centered model, which is absolutely unaffordable and untenable in today's world, she's paying the tuitions of the first class herself because the new teaching hospital she built is so insanely expensive it couldn't run on affordable tuitions. There's no way to scale what she's doing for all Americans. She wants patients to paint while they recover from things, because it helped her.
Either she's out of touch as all hell and doesn't understand any of this (possible), or she's really just creating a template for the rich (likely) or both are possible.
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Man I read that whole thing and found it to be really vague. I mean, is this new strategy supposed to rely on crystals, meditation, what? Just sounds like another rich person trying to make something SHE would call a legacy. She'd have better results if she started putting some of that wealth into lobbying.
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A criminal tumor wants me to go to the doctor?
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The company doctor.
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7 comments
Fuuuaahhh! Lady, the conservative talking point that doctors are giving patients "all sorts of tests" they don't really need is an attack on preventative medicine for poor people. How TF do you think you make a diagnosis or figure out what's wrong with someone without running tests? Tea leaves? Blood letting?
Consistent and affordable access to healthcare is the difference for the poor and the wealthy. If you can only afford tp go to the doctor once you're already sick then there is no prevention. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, and I'm so sick of pretending we don't know what hospital bills look like in other countries.
We should not be allowing hospitals with CEOs and COOs that have salaries in the millions nonprofit status. Why TF are we doing this?
Or, why not make medical nonprofit status contingent on full acceptance of Medicaid and Medicare? You've got an insane number of administrative positions working in giant hospitals.
Why is a hospital with non profit status able to say "our doctors won't take Medicaid?" (which seems to usually happens bc administration pressures doctors to not accept medicaid bc they know they won't be reimbursed).
Y'all are just making up these numbers for the cost of a hospital visit. Why is nonprofit status not contingent on all those administrative positions figuring out how to make the numbers look like they would in any other developed country so that Medicaid and Medicare won't be leaving things unpaid?
If you just truly can't figure out a way your hospital can accept programs paid for by U.S. tax dollars, maybe you shouldn't be getting a fucking tax exemption for simply running a for profit business?