The Sustainability of the Healthcare System
The sustainability of the healthcare system won’t be secured by another round of cost-cutting or clever benefit design alone, but by a hard cultural pivot toward alignment: payers, providers, employers, and patient advocates pulling on the same rope instead of grading each other on different exams. Right now we’ve built a maze that assumes people can become expert navigators at the worst moment of their lives, and a system that requires sick, frightened patients to “appeal correctly” is not a system designed to last. The good news is that public patience is thinning, and that scrutiny—born from everyday stories of delays, denials, and needless gaps in care—can be the pressure that finally makes simpler, fairer pathways non-negotiable. If we want healthcare to be durable in both dollars and trust, we should stop auditioning villains and start engineering a baseline promise: when someone is vulnerable, the system meets them with clarity, advocacy, and an easy way to fix what goes wrong.
