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Norm-Questioner

The longer I've practiced medicine, the more I've had to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: many of the norms we've built the modern western health system around aren't based on what actually heals people. They're based on what's measurable, billable, and scalable.

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I have been questioning the ethics of my industry well before I became a physician. Watching my uncle, who was dying of leukemia, battle with insurance companies to cover his chemotherapy left quite a mark on me as a 12 year old.

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Reducing human afflictions to a series of codes to submit to insurance companies, to fight for them to pay for medications that don’t even address the root causes of said afflictions, has never sat well with me.

I have watched—and worked—in dismay over the last two decades as the U.S. Healthcare system has sunk into a state of slow collapse, as patients and providers are caught in a tug of war between the various stakeholders controlling the narrative and setting the rules and prices of “healthcare”, and determining who can access it.

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Health equity became my passion, my purpose, and the focus of my work both globally and domestically. I wanted everyone to have access to care, regardless of their socioeconomic or geographic status.

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Another B. Fuller quote to summarize my stance regarding how we can fix U.S. Healthcare:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete".
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Dreaming of
this new model—

Healthcare reform is totally possible.

But not in the way most people think.

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