Category: Healthcare Management
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Executive Summary Southern Oregon is not experiencing a sudden healthcare collapse. What it is experiencing is more dangerous: a slow, quiet degradation of its commercial insurance market that is largely invisible until premiums spike, carriers retreat, and employers stop offering coverage altogether. Across Jackson, Josephine, and surrounding counties, a growing share of middle‑income families are…
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Health insurance is supposed to reduce risk. But for many Southern Oregon households, especially those with high-deductible plans, it often does something more confusing. It delays certainty. You can be insured, do the responsible thing, ask the right questions, and still end up with a bill that materially disrupts your month. That is the transparency…
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Why Medical Education Must Change — and What That Means for Our Community There is a particular cruelty to what happens to idealistic young people who enter medical school. They arrive — curious, empathetic, often idealistic, drawn by a genuine desire to help other human beings. What follows is four years of relentless memorization, obedience…
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Artice 3 of 3 We began this series with Carol — a 54-year-old woman in Ashland whose quiet cognitive changes were dismissed as normal aging. We showed you why they probably aren’t. We showed you that Alzheimer’s is, for women, a midlife disease that begins silently in the brain years before any test currently standard…
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Article 2 0f 3 In Article One, we met Carol — a healthy 54-year-old woman in Ashland whose subtle cognitive changes were dismissed as normal aging. We introduced the science showing that Alzheimer’s is in many ways a midlife disease for women, and that the hormonal transition of menopause may be a central driver of…
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Article 1 of 3 Meet Carol. Carol is 54 years old. She lives in Ashland, hikes the Siskiyou Mountains on weekends, volunteers at the food bank on Thursdays, and raised three children. She is, by every measure her doctor uses, healthy. But something is off. She has noticed it for about two years. Words slip…
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Here is the central paradox of American healthcare. We spend nearly twice as much per person as any other developed country. We have the most advanced hospitals, the most innovative drugs, the most sophisticated medical technology on earth. And yet the average American dies younger than the average person in Canada, the UK, Germany, France,…
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Imagine a tube of toothpaste. Countries with national healthcare systems — Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Japan — have clamped one end of the tube. They exercise price controls or negotiate aggressively as unified national buyers. Pharmaceutical costs in those countries are suppressed. Physics is physics. All that pressure has to go somewhere. It goes…
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Before you can fix a machine, you need to understand how it runs. And the American healthcare system — the largest, most expensive, most complicated healthcare machine ever built — is one that almost nobody, including most of the people working inside it, truly understands end to end. This series is an attempt to change…
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This article stands on its own, but readers interested in its practical implications for Southern Oregon’s healthcare system may find the three-part series on the Southern Oregon Community Purchasing Alliance — also published by ReImagine Healthcare — a useful companion. Something happened to us during the pandemic that we have not fully reckoned with. Not…